Tungsten Carbide Core 7.62x51mm Armor Piercing Projectiles: Designing, penetration simulation and Testing

Abstract The ballistic performance and penetration capabilities of armour piercing (AP) projectiles have attracted considerable interest, especially with the development of personal body armour. This paper presents the steps for converting conventional 7.62x51 mm AP projectiles into advanced ones provided with tungsten carbide cores. Designing, finite element modeling and testing procedures have been studied to enhance the penetration capability of developed projectiles. The internal ballistic parameters were calculated for these projectiles to ensure barrel safety. PRODAS ballistic software is used to predict the stability of developed projectiles during flight. The penetration ability in armour steel with a hardness of 450–500 HB for all the designed projectiles as well as the traditional NATO AP projectile is evaluated both numerically using ANSYS software and experimentally by fining. In conclusion, the penetration capability of the best configuration of the developed projectiles is almost twice that of the NATO AP projectile.