An Ultra-Thin Screen-Printed Conductive Film for Fragment Velocity Measurement: Design, Simulation, and Experimental Validation

Laser-screen targets suffer from prolonged response time, and printed-circuit-board (PCB) targets induce substantial kinetic energy loss of fragments upon penetration. To mitigate these technical limitations, this study develops a novel screen-printed velocity measurement film (VMF) characterized by a fast response time and low kinetic energy loss. The proposed VMF consists of silver conductive grids and a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate, with an ultra-thin overall thickness of 0.175 mm and identical width and spacing of 0.8 mm for all silver strips. This work comprehensively elaborates the film fabrication procedure and validates its practical engineering performance through live-fire fragment penetration experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that the VMF achieves an average response time of 0.14 μs under metallic fragment impact, with average fragment kinetic energy losses of 1.32 J and 2.09 J when penetrating the first and second VMF layers, respectively. Owing to its rapid transient response and minimal interference with fragment flight trajectories, the designed VMF effectively improves the precision of fragment velocity measurement, possessing great application potential for field blast-testing scenarios.