Instrumented Projectiles for Measuring Impact Forces to Characterize Ballistic Behavior of Fabrics and Composites

The Army utilizes soft body and vehicle armor systems made up of fabrics and composite materials for resistance to minimum weight ballistic impacts. To characterize the performance of these systems, the development of high fidelity sensors and data collection instrumentation is a necessary"first step"to assess the armor system"s performance. An instrumented test projectile that can report the load-time characteristics of the impact event will provide essential information for evaluation and design of these armor systems. It is proposed to develop a very small data collection instrument with multiple input sensor channels to capture the ballistics impact load-time history information. The system must survive dynamic, high energy impacts and provide the bandwidth and dynamic range to capture the critical data. With the ever evolving advances in weapons technology, the need for high fidelity data collection becomes even more important in the future. The proposed unit will be a robust, low power, and low cost design, and it will be based earlier developed technology used in the development of small, low cost instrumentation for munitions applications including guidance, sensor management, and sensor data collection.