EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF TERMINAL BALLISTIC IMPACT OF GELATIN

Abstract

Knowledge of wound ballistics is essential to protect our warfighters. The presented work achieves this goal by studying impact into 10% ballistic gelatin. Experiments were carried out with steel spheres for three different velocities. Decay curves are recorded to give the complete picture of this complex event. As the background for numerical modeling of the experiments, a comprehensive literature study was done on this topic, especially related to numerical algorithms, and applied constitutive models for gelatin. The γSPH solver in the IMPETUS Afea Solver Suite is used to model the gelatin utilizing GPU technology for computational efficiency. Power-law plasticity, non-linear elasticity, and simple fluid constitutive models were tested, and results are compared with the experiments. The simple fluid model seems to yield the best results, and in general, all results are within a margin of 10% error.