Abstract：Ceramic is a material commonly used for impact protection, but it is generally subjected to brittle failure which leads to poor impact resistance when it is used independently and makes it necessary to combine with other ductile materials like metals. Nacre-like ceramic/metal composite plates are designed by mimicking the “brick-and-mortar” microstructure of nacre with ceramic tile as “brick” and metal as “mortar”. Impact resistance of the nacre-like plates is analyzed by numerical modelling and compared with ceramic plates and common layered ceramic/metal plates. The modelling results show that from the perspective of residual velocity of projectile, the nacre-like plates possess much better impact resistance than the ceramic plate, and also have obvious advantage over the layered plates when volume ratio of metal is relatively low, but difference between the performance of nacre-like composite plates and layered plates decreases as the volume ratio of metal increases. The advantage of nacre-like plates mainly results from the intermediate stage of the penetration process. When projectiles approach back faces of target plates at the later stage, layered composite plates can provide higher penetration resistance. To make use of this advantage of layered plates, hybrid structures are further designed by using nacre-like composite plate as cover plate and metal plate as backing plate. Through the numerical modelling of impact resistance of hybrid structures, it is found that they can produce higher impact resistance compared with nacre-like composite plates, and there is an intermediate volume ratio of metal to maximize their impact resistance.
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