Fragmentation of an advanced ceramic under ballistic impact: Mechanisms and microstructure

In this paper, the impact-induced fragmentation of a commercially available hot-pressed boron carbide is explored. Fragmentation has been noted previously by many authors to be important in the impact performance of advanced ceramics, and so this paper seeks to provide some of the first near-complete and detailed measurements of individual fragment size and shape distributions available in the literature. Fragment size and shapes are quantified...