Effects of fabric folding and thickness on the impact behaviour of multi-ply UHMWPE woven fabrics

This paper presents an experimental study on the dynamic response of multi-ply woven fabrics subjected to impact by a spherical steel projectile in a velocity regime ranging from 120 to 200 m/s. A plain weave fabric made of Spectra® 1000 fibres was used to fabricate test samples having different numbers of layers and fold patterns. The effect of fabric folding was investigated by comparing the impact performance of samples consisting of separate unfolded fabrics, continuous accordion-fold fabrics, and continuous roll-fold fabrics, respectively. It was found that the perforation resistance and energy absorption capacity were significantly improved by folding a fabric into multiple plies compared to the unfolded counterparts, and the roll-fold fabrics performed best in this study. Fabric folding seemed to have only a negligible effect on the back-face deflections of woven fabrics. The effect of thickness (or the number of layers) on energy absorption efficiency was different among the tested fabrics, due to the different inter-layer interactions depending on fold patterns.