Advanced impact protection systems can experience serious damage due to contact with projectiles such as fragments or entire fan blades. To prevent catastrophic damage of such systems will require sophisticated materials and complex designs. The development of advanced ballistic protection systems will place increased emphasis on the use of composite materials and on numerical simulations to assess these new systems due to the cost and limitations of testing facilities and the increased capability of computing power. Example applications include the design of body armor for the protection of personnel, the design of fragment containment systems for aircraft engines, and the design of orbital debris shielding for the protection of manned spacecraft. The current research has developed a new mesomechanical particle-element material model for woven material impact response, a velocity dependent friction model to simulate yarn interactions, and a strain rate dependent model for Kevlar. In recent research, a new class of shear-thickening fluid (STF) composites has been developed for use in impact protection systems. Advancements in the current work include a Bingham shear stress model for STF effects and a new mixture equation of state for the STF Kevlar that captures the thermodynamic properties of the constituents. The numerical methods and material model developed in this research have been validated through the simulation of three dimensional impact experiments on different Kevlar target geometries. This dissertation also provides new data for fragment simulating projectile impacts on Kevlar with different boundary conditions and new data for aluminum cylinder and steel disk projectile impacts on neat and STF Kevlar with different boundary conditions. / text

Functionally graded materials (FGMs) are composites with continuous material property variations. The distinct interfaces between the reinforcement and the matrix in classical composites are potential damage initiation sites. The concept of FGM aims at avoiding the material mismatch at the interfaces. Functionally graded materials originated from the need for a material that has high-toughness at very high operating temperatures that occur in rocket nozzles and aeroplane engines. One of the early applications of graded materials can be thus found in thermal barrier coatings of gas turbine blades. Recent applications of FGMs include optoelectronics, ballistic impact resistance structures, wear resistant coatings and others. Although the manufacturing and applications of FGMs are well developed the basic mechanics of failure is not well understood, which is important in developing engineering design methodologies. Modern day design practice uses the concepts of fracture mechanics and the fracture properties of graded materials is not well understood. Most studies in the literature have assumed that the material response of the bulk functionally graded material to be elastic even though the constituents are nominally ductile. Some asymptotic analysis available in the literature have described the effect of ductility on the fracture parameters. However, these analysis are not complete in the sense that they have some undetermined constants. The present thesis aims at performing whole-field finite element (FE) simulations of a crack embedded in a ductile functionally graded material subjected to an anti-plane shear (mode-3) loading. A J2-deformation theory based power-law hardening nonlinear material response is assumed. The material property variation is assumed to be in the radial-direction (r-FGM), tangential to the crack (x-FGM), normal to the crack plane (y-FGM) and also at an arbitrary angle to the crack-plane (xy-FGM). Yet another power law described the material property variation. The competition between the indices of the hardening and material property variation is understood by performing a parametric analysis by varying both systematically. Our results indicate that the first most singular term of the asymptotic series remains unaffected. For some values of the material property variation index, the second asymptotic term is affected. The semi-closed form solutions available in the literature were unable to decipher the relative range of dominance of the first and second terms. From the present whole-field FEM analysis were able to extract this relative range of dominance. Our results indicate the range of dominance of the first term is least for FGMs when the material property variation is in the direction to the crack (x-FGM), and it is more for y-FGM.