Numerical Analysis of Hyper Velocity Impact on quasi-isotropic carbon fiber reinforced polymer laminates

The Hyper Velocity Impact Experiments of prospective structural materials and shields are necessary to ensure the safety of satellites and spacecraft, particularly in lower earth orbits. The advancement of computational tools has made it simpler to reproduce the hyper velocity impact scenarios by facilitating the change in control parameters during simulations. Numerical models have been extensively used for the impact simulations of metallic target plates that possess isotropic behavior. However, due to the intricate nature of the material models, failure models, shock response, and fracture models, it is more challenging to simulate orthotropic target materials compared to isotropic materials. In this work, a numerical model has been adopted to predict the behavior of orthotropic materials during hyper velocity impact experiments involving spherical aluminum AA2017-T4 projectiles (1 mm in diameter). The orthotropic material comprises a 16 -layered sequence of carbon fiber -reinforced epoxy plies in a quasi -isotropic arrangement. The numerical simulations were conducted on the ANSYS Autodyn (R) finite element software. On comparison of numerical and experimental results, it was observed that perforation diameter from the simulation was in close agreement with that of the experimental at both 2.5 km/s and 5.0 km/s. Additionally, the damage mechanisms (energy absorption) for different failure modes of the laminates were analyzed in detail. Fiber pullout and Fiber debonding were the dominant failure mechanisms contributing to more than 90% of the surface energy.