Structural light weighting is driving material innovation across automotive, defense and aerospace industries. In the case of defense and aerospace applications, structural lightweight materials increases the mobility of the military by allowing easier transportation to a particular destination as well as the transit around that destination. Integration of lightweight materials in the defense and aerospace industries requires the ballistic and blast capacities of a material to compete with traditional structural materials. Fiber reinforced plastics have low density and high strength, which make them ideal structural light weighting materials. Under high strain rate loadings, complex damage mechanisms occur within the composite allowing for large amounts of energy absorption. However, these complex damage mechanisms can also lead to undesirable structural characteristics. To improve the overall design of traditional composites, attempts have been made to leverage the benefits of both composite materials and metal alloys, while minimizing the weaknesses of each constituent. By incorporating both composite and metal materials in a single hybrid system the collective blast capacity in a joint material system can be improved. In this work, a free piston shock tube is tailored to create a quasi-Friedlander pressure form to simulate blast loading on a single interfaced, glass fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite metal hybrid panel. Damage and deflection characteristics are obtained for the hybrid material system. Damage is assessed by nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methods and dynamic deflection characteristics are obtained by an optical fringe projection method. Both damage and deflection observations are then correlated to an LS Dyna multi-material model where further observations and insights are drawn about the behavior of composite metal hybrid panels.
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