Evaluating impact damage to fabric-based personal armor by infrared NDT

The paper considers the thermo-mechanical mechanism of interaction between the damage agents and armor protection made of polymer fabrics. A simplified mathematical model is proposed to describe the deceleration of a damage agent within an armor fabric due to the dissipation of energy expended on irreversible stretching deformations of fabric fibers, as well as fiber slipping friction and material heating. Woven fabric layers are replaced by solid layers characterized by averaged stiffness and viscosity. A discrete numerical model of a solid material is proposed to reduce a problem with a finite number of degrees of freedom; motion equations are obtained on the basis of the Lagrange equations of the second kind, and for their integration, a stable non-conservative difference scheme is used. The software implementation is based on a functional-object paradigm which allows the modeling of conjugated processes. The parameters of governing equations are identified by using the experimental data. Some illustrative examples of interaction between damage agents and armor barriers with different arrangement of fibers are presented. The proposed model can be used to predict the quality of armor protection with the changing number and location of fibers, as well as to test the armor protection by applying the technique of infrared thermography.