Simulation of Bullet Impact on Bullet Resistant Steel Plate

Godrej Security Solution Division has developed bullet resistant solutions like Bullet resistant doors, Mantraps, Bullet resistant screening for banks, and bullet resistant cabins etc which are designed as per the requirements mentioned in various standards like National institute of Justice (NIJ), Underwriters Laboratory (UL), etc. These agencies have established the performance criteria and classified it into various protection levels. To gain the confidence in these bullet resistant solutions it is decided to test performance of steel plate for its resistance against bullet. This paper will present the NIJ level III steel plate behavior against the dynamic loading of 7.62 x 39mm steel core AK47 ammunition using Radioss explicit non-linear analysis. For simulation, test setup was done according to the requirement of DIN EN 1522 and 1523 [1]. To verify the results of software simulation, the same steel plate was physically tested at Bundeswehr Technical Center for Protective and Special Technologies, Germany to prove its resistance against the mentioned ammunition. It was found that the steel plate behavior in Radioss explicit non-linear analysis is very much similar with actual test results. This study has shown that the predictive capability for penetration of steel core bullet is quite good with Radioss non-linear explicit analysis. With set simulation methodology and increased confidence level, same type of simulation can be tried out for other protection levels of different standards. It will save time and cost involved in actual testing.