Multiple Hit Performance of Small Arms Protective Armor

Our nation’s warfighters require advanced armor to give them the best protection while allowing mobility to perform their missions. This proposal will develop two powerful tools to aid future body armor advancements. First, this research program will develop a statistical analysis software that will predict likelihood of impacts based on defined attack scenarios (i.e. rifle, distance and firing mode). This will be completed with support from the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). ARL will approve shot pattern data that Transparent Armor Solutions (TAS) and UCLA will use to perform the statistical analysis. The analysis will then be used to develop a software, written in a common statistical analysis code (R), that engineers could use for predicting impact locations. Second, TAS and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) will further enhance the EPIC code by developing the ability to predict armor performance for boron carbide based armor solutions. The focus within this research program will be to improve the ability to model the ballistic response of boron carbide ceramic using the Johnson-Holmquist-Beissel (JHB) ceramic model. After development of the boron carbide model in EPIC, computations will be completed on single and multiple impacts into boron carbide armor.