90 Miles From Tyranny : Watch This Metal Foam Annihilate an Armor-Piercing Bullet...

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Saturday, April 9, 2016

Watch This Metal Foam Annihilate an Armor-Piercing Bullet...



Metal foams are light and surprisingly tough. Actually, make that very tough: In this video, a composite metal foam turns an armor-piercing bullet to dust on impact, as if it were a piece of chalk.

The experiment was performed by researchers from NC State, led by Afsaneh Rabiei. It saw a M2 armor-piercing projectile—0.3 inches in diameter—being fired at a lump of metal foam. Rabiei explained to PhysOrg what happened:

“We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters. To put that in context, the National Institute of Justice standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor.”

Which, wow.

These metal foams can be made in many different ways. Some are manufactured by bubbling gas through molten metal, while others cast metallic alloy around hollow metal spheres to provide voids.

Either way, metal foams—which have existed in one form or other for decades now–seem to finally be coming of age.
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1 comment:

Larry said...

This is a layered composite with metal foam as the middle, not the strike plate. Similar to what's been deployed on armored vehicles for years.

"A high-performance light-weight composite armor system has been manufactured using boron carbide ceramics as the strike face, composite metal foam processed by powder metallurgy technique as a bullet kinetic energy absorber interlayer, and aluminum 7075 or Kevlar™ panels as backplates with a total armor thickness less than 25 mm. The ballistic tolerance of this novel composite armor system has been evaluated against the 7.62 × 51 mm M80 and 7.62 × 63 mm M2 armor piercing projectiles according to U.S. National Institute of Justice (NIJ) standard 0101.06. The results showed that composite metal foams absorbed approximately 60–70% of the total kinetic energy of the projectile effectively and stopped both types of projectiles with less depth of penetration and backplate deformation than that specified in the NIJ 0101.06 standard guidelines. Finite element analysis was performed using Abaqus/Explicit to study the failure mechanisms and energy absorption of the armor system. The results showed close agreement between experimental and analytical results."