Numerical investigation into ballistic impact response of hybrid woven fabric laminates

The hybrid woven fabric laminates exhibit excellent ballistic performance, however, the design method and ballistic resistance mechanism still call for investigation. The paper presents a numerical model to describe the damage behavior of woven composites, which is implemented in a VUMAT subroutine. The validity of the model is verified with experimental data for the glass-Kevlar hybrid composite laminates in terms of residual velocity. The further researches are carried out and the results reveal that placing one layer of glass fabric toward to impact side followed by three layers of Kevlar fabric achieves the maximum energy absorption, indicating the availability of optimization design to enhance laminate performance by appropriate layer sequence. It has also been observed that the existence of large delamination area between glass layer and Kevlar layer leads to wide deformation of front layers to absorb more energy. The Kevlar layer shows the higher stress level and longer engaging time than glass layer, which results in more energy being needed to penetrate the laminate.