Experimentation research on failure behavior of tungsten alloy penetrating low carbon steel plate at high velocity

The failure behavior and inducement mechanism of tungsten alloy fragments penetrating low carbon steel plate at high velocities were investigated. The physical forms of 93W and 95W fragments after penetrating the low-carbon steel target at the velocities higher than 1500 m/s were obtained by ballistic gun experiments. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) was used to analyze damaged tungsten alloy fragments after the penetration. The result shows that for low-carbon steel plate, when the penetration velocity of the tungsten alloy fragment is higher than 1500 m/s, 93W tungsten particle is dimple-type transgranular fracture, while 95W tungsten particle is quasi-cleavage transgranular fracture. Both 93W and 95W fragments melt partially, and the 50 μm tungsten particles melt and condense as less than 10 μm spherical particles and arrange tightly. The macro phenomenon is the penetration of the whole damaged particles.