Ballistic impact behaviors of aluminum alloy sandwich panels with honeycomb cores: An experimental study

To study the protection property of aluminum alloy sandwich panels with honeycomb cores under the attack of bullets or debris, quasi-static perforation, and ballistic impact tests were conducted, in which the thicknesses of the face sheet and core were 0.5–2.0 and 12.7 mm, respectively, while projectiles with diameter 7.5 mm and impact velocity 50–220 m/s were employed. Based on the experiments, the influences of impact velocity, face sheet thickness, core density as well as the nose shape of the projectiles were investigated. The results showed that in the impact tests, the sandwich panels dissipated much more energy than those in quasi-static perforation tests, and the energy absorption and ballistic limit of the sandwich panels increased with the increase of impact velocity. The influence of face sheet thickness was more remarkable than the core density, which was due to the relative density of honeycomb is too small. Although the increase of core density could induce the increase of energy absorption, this effect is more effective for thinner face sheet. Moreover, under the same impact velocity about 200 m/s and face sheet thickness 1.0 mm, the ballistic limit for conical-nosed projectile is highest, while it is lowest for flat-nosed projectile.