Hypervelocity impact damage in alumina

Restricted until 14 Aug. 2009.Ceramics are important engineering materials for their outstanding hardness. One of the most widely used ceramics is alumina, a candidate for armor in defense and aerospace industry. Deformation and fracture mechanisms in alpha-alumina under hypervelocity impact up to 18km/s are investigated using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations containing 540-million atoms. Impacting projectile causes melting and local amorphization of the substrate in a spherical surrounding region. Away from the impact face, a wide range of deformations emerge and disappear under the influence of local stress fields, e.g., basal and pyramidal slips, basal and rhombohedral twins, which show good agreement with the experimental and theoretical results. Furthermore, new deformation modes such as twin along {0-111} are observed, and the relation between deformation patterns and local stress levels are probed. During unloading, micro-cracks nucleate extensively at the intersections of previous deformations. These micro-cracks grow and coalesce to form fractures under tensile stresses by the unloading wave. The substrate eventually fails along the surface of an hourglass-shaped region, when spallation ejects clusters of substrate material into the vacuum. We also carried out planar shock simulations of alpha-alumina single crystal and nanophase systems. The results show correlations between the atomistic deformation mechanisms and the elastic-plastic response of ceramic material observed in shock loading experiments