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

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. Ceramic armor is armor used by armored vehicles and in personal armor to resist projectile penetration through high hardness and compressive strength. Chobham armour is the informal name of a composite armour developed in the 1960s at the british tank research centre on chobham common surrey.

The strongest and lightest ceramic is boron carbide. The name has since become the common generic term for composite ceramic vehicle armour. The most common ceramic materials used for armor applications are alumina boron carbide silicon carbide and titanium diboride. Ceramics offer an advantage over steel in weight reduction and over all metals in impact energy absorption.

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. Ceramic composite armor plates are placed in body armor plate carriers and worn to protect against bullets projectiles fragmentation shrapnel and stab threats. Ceramic materials for using as ballistic armor must be sufficiently rigid to fragment the bullet and reduce its speed transforming it into small fragments that should be stopped by the layer of flexible material that supports the ceramic. 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.

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. Most ceramic composite body armor plates cannot withstand multiple hits to the same area.