The Effects of Extra Yarn Gripping on Fabric Ballistic Performance

Abstract

The development of weaponry drives the demand for advanced body armour materials. The heavy weight of currently fielded armour systems and subsequent reduction in wearer’s mobility has highlighted the need for light-weight personal armour systems. The primary objective of body armour research is to focus on the development of lightweight and wearable garments that effectively resist ballistic impact with low-cost. This research is concentrated on manipulating the inter-yarn friction in the ballistic fabrics by means of weaving technology in order to improve the energy absorption of the ballistic panels. By using textile techniques, 5 novel fabrics with enhanced yarn gripping insertion were designed and created utilising wrapping angles between the warp and weft yarns in the fabrics in this research. It was revealed that the increased wrapping angle provides higher inter-yarn friction over the normal wrapping angle by yarn pull-out tests and the pull- out force can be increased up to 128%. Ballistic performance of the engineered fabrics was evaluated experimentally by ballistic penetration tests with designed layer arrangement. The improvement based on average energy absorption for the fabric was found relating to the impact location on the engineered fabrics but such discretion disappeared for fabric panels containing larger number of fabric layers. It was found that the leno insertion method among the other methods (cramming and double pick) showed superior ballistic performance to the rest of the engineered structures and the conventional plain woven fabrics in the V50 test. It was established that optimal layer arrangement for layers of fabrics with leno insertion for ballistic performance was achieved by offsetting the leno insertion lines among the adjacent layers of fabrics. FE model was established using ABAQUS® software for numerical analysis to achieve further and more comprehensive understanding of the influence of the inter-yarn friction on the ballistic performance of fabrics and panels based on the use of fabrics with leno insertions. The optimal leno gap was found to be 4 cm which was related to the highest impact energy absorption. EV50 evaluation of panels made from the engineered fabrics confirmed the optimal design. Impact locations for panels with different designs were also studied numerically as an extension of the findings obtained from ballistic tests, and it confirmed leno insertion facilitates energy absorption in the plain area.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Xiaogang Chen (Supervisor)