Wave propagation in lightweight composite armor

Abstract
Lightweight structural armor designs consist of multiple layers of ceramic, composite materials, metallic foams and other materiais. Under ballistic impacts, the propagation of stress waves through the thickness is of interest to designers. It is recognized that events occurring during the early stages of the impact determine how well the armor will resist it. Extensive finite element analyses have been performed and a few publications have shown that capturing the essential features of this problem numerically can be difficult. In this article, an exact solution is presented for analyzing the one-dimensional impact of a foreign object against a multi-layered structure. The approach is simple, it leads to a better understanding of the physics of the problem, and provides results that are difficult to duplicate numerically