Abstract
Military personnel use protective armour systems that are frequently exposed to low-level
damage, such as non-ballistic impact, wear-and-tear from everyday use, and damage during
storage of equipment. The extent to which such low-level pre-damage could affect the
performance of an armour system is unknown. In this work, low-level pre-damage has been
introduced into a Kevlar/phenolic resin-starved composite panel using tensile loading. The
tensile stress-strain behaviour of this eight-layer material has been investigated and has been
found to have two distinct regions; these have been understood in terms of the microstructure
and damage within the composite panels investigated using micro-computed tomography and
digital image correlation. Ballistic testing carried out on pristine (control) and pre-damaged
panels did not indicate any difference in the V50 ballistic performance. However, an indication
of a difference in response to ballistic impact was observed; the area of maximal local out-ofplane deformation for the pre-damaged panels was found to be twice that of the control panels,
and the global out-of-plane deformation across the panel was also larger.