Penetration of common ordinary strength water saturated concrete targets by rigid ogive-nosed steel projectiles

•Spherical cavity-expansion approximation models are developed for the penetration analysis of brittle materials.•The new spherical cavity-expansion approximation models only require material properties from laboratory scale material tests and no prior depth of penetration data.•The new spherical cavity-expansion approximation models are employed to model the penetration of water saturated ordinary strength R30A7 concrete.•Model predictions are shown to be in reasonably good agreement with corresponding experimental data.

In this paper, we employ a dynamic spherical cavity-expansion solution for use with the spherical cavity-expansion approximation to analyze the penetration of common ordinary strength water saturated concrete targets by small scale rigid ogive-nosed projectiles with normal impact. To do this, we first obtain a quasi-static spherical cavity-expansion model for the radial stress at the cavity surface of a plastic–cracked–elastic material. Next, we add on a target inertia based term to the quasi-static radial stress at the cavity surface to obtain an approximate expression for the dynamic radial stress acting at the surface of the spherical cavity. This spherical cavity-expansion solution is employed with spherical cavity-expansion approximation based penetration models that previously required prior depth of penetration data to obtain the quasi-static target resistance function. With the newly proposed penetration models, a description of the common ordinary strength water saturated concrete material is based on a linear pressure–volumetric strain relation and a pressure dependent shear strength plasticity envelope with a tensile cutoff and is obtained from laboratory scale material tests; therefore, no prior depth of penetration data are required. Analytical model predictions obtained with the newly proposed model for final depth of penetration as a function of striking velocity, along with analytical models for acceleration, velocity and displacement as a function of time, are shown to be in good agreement with the corresponding experimental penetration data.