Terminal Ballistics

The high velocity impact of solid bodies has attracted a large amount of research over the past century by both military and civil engineers. These impacts, at hundreds to thousands of meters per second, involve large deformations of the impacting bodies which can result in their total destruction around the impacted area. The impact of projectiles on armored vehicles (at 1–2 km/s) and the impact of meteorites at space stations at (10–20 km/s) are areas of much interest in this field. At impact velocities of a few meters per second, the structural response of the bodies is the relevant issue for safety engineers in the automotive industry. In order to study the effects of high velocity impacts, a special scientific discipline has been developed over the past 50 years, termed the dynamic response of solids to impulsive loading. This field involves several different disciplines such as: elasticity and plasticity theories, hydrodynamics, high pressure physics, material response to high strain rates, fracture mechanics, and failure analysis.