Experimental and numerical study on the perforation of AA6005-T6 panels

Extruded aluminium panels find their use in many different structures such as offshore platforms, bridge decks, train and ship components and lightweight protection systems. Impacts or other types of high-speed loading conditions are thus a relevant issue for several of these applications. There are, however, not many investigations published on the perforation of extruded aluminium panels covering experiments in combination with numerical analyses. This paper presents an experimental and numerical study on the perforation of AA6005-T6 aluminium panels impacted by ogival-nosed steel projectiles. The chosen panel has three triangular-shaped cells with a total depth of 130 mm. The wall thickness is 6 mm in the front and rear side plate, and 3 mm in the slanting webs. A rather comprehensive material test programme has been carried out in order to determine the material's response to dynamic loading. The experimental results were used to calibrate slightly modified versions of the Johnson-Cook constitutive relation and fracture criterion. 3D numerical simulations of the perforation process were then performed on a high-performance computer using the MPP version of the explicit finite element code LS-DYNA. In the simulations, the typical dimension of the elements was less than 1 mm. The numerical model is able to capture the main trends in the experiments in an adequate manner, and excellent agreement between numerical and experimental results is obtained.