BALLISTIC LIMIT SCALING STUDIES USING LASER-DRIVEN AND CONVENTIONAL GUNS

The number of tests needed to determine the ballistic limit of a material can make screening new armor formulations or configurations a costly exercise. A relatively new technology, based on pulsed lasers, has been used to launch micro-projectiles. With this technique, 300 m-diameter steel microspheres were driven at velocities up ~500 m/s, allowing hundreds or even thousands of tests per day. The main concern when testing at very small scales is how the ballistic limits compare to their large-scale counterpart. This paper presents scaling studies performed on two aluminums Al6061-T6, and Al7075-T6, ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (Dyneema HB80), and Kevlar® targets. For the aluminum targets, experiments were performed at scales that span two orders of magnitude: 1x scale (300 m projectile), 10x scale (3 mm projectile), and 100x scale (30 mm projectile). For the composite and fabric targets, only two scales were tested: 1x and 10x.