Impact and damage of an armor composite

The use of carbon fiber composites under shock and impact loading in aerospace, defense and automotive applications is increasingly important. Therefore prediction of the composite behavior and damage in these conditions is critical. Influence of anisotropy, fiber orientation and the rate of loading during the impact is considered in the present study and validated by comparison with experiments. The experiments deal with the plane, ballistic and Taylor impacts accompanied by high-speed photography observations and tomography of recovered samples. The CTH hydrocode is employed as the modeling platform with an advanced rate sensitive material model used for description of the deformation and damage of the transversely isotropic composite material.