Ballistic performance of polyurea-coated armor grade ceramic tiles

The use of ceramics as energy absorbents has been studied by many researchers and some improvements in the ballistic performance of ceramic tiles have been made by coating them with different classes of materials (e.g. E-glass/epoxy, carbon-fiber/epoxy, etc.). Using ceramics for energy absorbing applications leads to a significant weight reduction of the system. Therefore, any modification to the ceramic configuration in the system which leads to more energy absorption with the same or less areal density is significant. On the other hand, polyurea has been proved to be an excellent energy dissipating agent in many applications. Inspired by this, we are studying the effect of coating ceramics with polyurea and other materials, on the energy absorption and ballistic performance of the resulting ceramic-based composites. In this study, we investigate the effect of polyurea on ballistic efficiency of ceramic tiles. To this end, we have performed a set of penetration tests on polyurea-ceramic composites. In our experiments, a high velocity projectile is propelled to impact and perforate the ceramic-polyurea composite. The velocity and mass of the projectile are measured before and after the penetration. The change in the kinetic energy of the projectile is evaluated and compared for different polyurea-ceramic configurations (e.g., polyurea on front face, polyurea on back face, polyurea between two ceramic tiles, etc.). The experimental results suggest that polyurea is not as effective as other restraining materials such as E-glass/epoxy and carbon-fiber/epoxy.