Ballistic Impact Response of HDPE/UHMWPE Polymer Composite

Abstract

The present work deals with ballistic impact response of high-density polyethylene/ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (HDPE/UHMWPE) polymer composite. Composite materials are anisotropic in nature, therefore to incorporate the constituent behaviour of composite material a widely used homogenisation technique has been implemented within ‘Digimat’ platform. Equivalent mechanical properties have been predicted at meso-scale by Digimat simulation tool. Further, these equivalent properties of the composite have been used to investigate ballistic impact response at macro-scale with the help of finite element method (FEM) package ANSYS-Autodyn. In the present study, HDPE/UHMWPE composite with 10 and 20 wt% of UHMWPE compositions have been considered. Numerical results are presented in the form of the residual velocity of the projectile, energy transfer to the plate and the von Mises stress of composite plate. It has been observed that 20 wt% of UHMWPE composite transferred 33.12% higher energy and 36.2% drop in residual velocity.