Lateral confinement effects in long-rod penetration of ceramics at hypervelocity

Reverse ballistic experiments were conducted using gold long rods impacting cylinders of silicon carbide to study the effect of failure kinetics in ceramic penetration. Some of the early experiments impacted off-centered due to the dynamics of the barrel and sabot. Nevertheless, the data appeared to be in good agreement with centered impact, although conventional wisdom suggested that penetration resistance should decrease due to lateral confinement effects. Numerical simulations of the experiments were conducted to investigate and to quantify the influence of lateral confinement as a function of impact velocity for the ceramic targets. Above 3.0 km/s, close proximity to a lateral boundary results in less than a 2% increase in the penetration velocity.