Ballistic penetration damages of hybrid plain-woven laminates with carbon, Kevlar and UHMWPE fibers in different stacking sequences

Hybrid composite materials combine different fibers in preform and take advantages of different mechanical behaviors for improving ballistic impact damage tolerances. Here we report ballistic impact damages of plain-woven laminates with different hybrids and stacking sequences. Three kinds of hybrid laminates, i.e., carbon/Kevlar, carbon/ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE), and UHMWPE/Kevlar, had been prepared and tested in ballistic penetration with fragment simulating projectiles (FSP). The residual velocities of the projectiles and impact damage morphologies of the laminates have been obtained to show impact energy absorptions for the different hybrid schemes. A micro structural model of the hybrid laminates had also been established to show impact damage mechanisms with finite element analysis (FEA). We found that the UHMWPE/Kevlar hybrid laminates with Kevlar layers as the front face have the highest energy absorption capacity, followed by the carbon/Kevlar hybrid laminates with carbon layers as the front face. The main damage modes are fiber breakages, matrix crack and interlayer delamination. The ballistic damage evolutions from the FEA results show that the major damage is shear failure for front layers, while tension failure for the back layers. We expect that the ballistic impact performance could be improved from the different hybrid schemes.& COPY; 2022 China Ordnance Society. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).