Ceramic Tank Armour

Ceramic armor can be used to protect vehicles as well as individual personnel and dates back to 1918.

Ceramic tank armour.

Other names informally given to chobham armour include burlington and dorchester. Ceramic armor is armor used by armored vehicles and in personal armor for its attenuative properties. Heat and sabot rounds may make it through the outer layer of the armor but they won t make it all the way into the crew compartment. Ceramic composite armor plates are placed in body armor plate carriers and worn to protect against bullets projectiles fragmentation shrapnel and stab threats.

Ceramics offer an advantage over steel in weight reduction and over all metals in impact energy absorption. Ceramic armor is armor used by armored vehicles and in personal armor to resist projectile penetration through high hardness and compressive strength. Ceramic material shatters as the heat round penetrates the highly energetic fragments destroying the geometry of the metal jet generated by the hollow shaped charge greatly diminishing the. The most common ceramic materials used for armor applications are alumina boron carbide silicon carbide and titanium diboride.

The ceramic material can absorb a lot of heat as well as heavy physical blows. Thus it is necessary that the ceramic material presents high elastic modulus and high hardness 2. The strongest and lightest ceramic is boron carbide. Ceramics are known to be some of the of the hardest materials and unlike materials such as kevlar which uses its fibers to catch the bullet ceramics break the bullet.

The core armor is a variation on the british chobham armor an arrangement of metal plates ceramic blocks and open space. A relatively famous form of composite armor is so called chobham armor that sandwiches a layer of ceramic between two plates of steel armor and is used on main battle tanks such as the abrams. In hard armor with ceramic inserts the kinetic energy of the projectile is absorbed and dissipated in localized shattering of this ceramic tile and blunting of the bullet material during its impact on the hard ceramic. Most ceramic composite body armor plates cannot withstand multiple hits to the same area.

Composite armor plates are lighter thicker and more flexible than steel plates. Ceramics are often used where light weight is important as they weigh less than metal alloys for a given degree of resistance.