WATER AS INTERLAYER FOR NON-EXPLOSIVE REACTIVE ARMOUR: NUMERICAL SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION

Non-Explosive Reactive Armour is composed of a sandwich of two inert plates and an interlayer of a soft material. Numerical simulation on NERA in interaction with shaped charge jets is complex, because of the immense pressure generated in the interlayer and the difficulties to identify the material parameters needed for numerical simulation in the relevant pressure regime. In this work, water is used as interlayer material for NERA. To take possible phase transitions in the interlayer into account, the Tillotson Equation of State was chosen for the numerical model of the water interlayer. The numerical simulations have been done with the -SPH code of Abstrao. The dynamic reaction of the NERA to the impact of a shaped charge jet and the resulting disturbance of the jet was very well predicted by the numerical model. This was validated experimentally with a state-of-the-art X-ray cineradiography setup.