Simulation of Large Fragment Impacts on Shear-Thickening Fluid Kevlar Fabric Barriers

Hybrid-particle-element methods developed for woven fabric impact modeling offer a new computational approach to fabric barrier design. Simulations performed using this technique have shown good agreement with small fragment impact experiments, and they capture the complex multilayer fabric dynamics observed in high-speed videos of impact testing. In recent research, the numerical method has been applied and evaluated in large fragment impact simulations, and it has been extended in order to model the inertial, thermodynamic, and energy dissipation properties of shear-thickening fluid Kevlar®. Simulations of large fragment impacts at velocities near 1000 ft=s show good agreement with neat Kevlar test data for perforated targets, but they diverge at near-ballistic limit conditions. Consistent with the experiment, the simulations indicate that, for the particular fabric and fluid combination investigated, shear-thickening fluid treatment does not improve the ballistic performance of neat fabric barriers when measured on an areal density basis. The simulations also suggest that shear-thickening effects may not play a major role in determining the ballistic performance of the augmented fabric.