Chapter 1087 Composite Armor
The workshop that Yifan Wubing inspected for the last time. It's the Armor Technology Workshop. "In Qu'e" special alloy armor technology research laboratory for tanks and ships.
About the confrontation between armor and artillery shells. The earliest bows and arrows and armor can be traced back to the cold weapon age. After the beginning of the firearms age, with the spread of cannonballs, armor in the original sense gradually withdrew from the stage of history. This period. The damage caused by firearms to people can only be described as horrific.
During this period, from the beginning of the firearms era to the emergence of tanks, it can be said that armor was at an absolute disadvantage. Infantrymen only have steel helmets that can provide limited protection for their heads, and armored vehicles cannot be used on a large scale due to insufficient power and poor off-road performance. As a result, infantry charges in the field have almost no protection at all, and the casualties are shocking.
Things came to a head during the First World War. A major turning point began to appear on the last day of the 6th year in the continent. On this day, forty-nine diamond-shaped steel monsters were thrown into the Suoyao River front line that was in a stalemate at that time. The rolling tracks crushed the German defense line, and human beings The weapon of the Go era in the history of the war was born. In order to keep it secret, the British named this weapon "Zhu", which originally meant water tank. Later it became the correct name of this weapon. The tank, a weapon of the Go era in the history of the modern war, was born.
In the early days, tanks relied on riveted high-carbon steel plates for defense. Before World War II, stronger and more reliable armor connection methods such as welding and casting began to be used on tanks, coupled with the application of alloy steel and the proposal of the sloped armor theory , making the tank's protection level continue to improve by leaps and bounds.
However, during this period, the improvement of protection was mainly achieved by increasing the armor thickness. However, the idea of relying solely on increasing the thickness has great limitations, because due to the limitations of the technical level and passability of the power system, the tank cannot It may be too heavy, and the sloped armor severely limits the space inside the vehicle and does not save weight. Therefore, the threat of artillery shells forced the engineers to find another way to think of materials and change the armor material. Ingredients, etc. to improve protection.
The breakthrough was first found on the sea-dominated battleships of the time. In order to improve protection, battleships at that time generally used case-hardened steel. So German engineers thought of applying case-hardened steel to tanks to improve the tank's protective power.
Of course, this is also related to the poor quality of German steel. German steel plates of the same thickness are often much lower than those produced in the Soviet Union in some key parameters. Although this method requires a lot of time, it is effective, so it is used in German tanks. Surface-treated alloy steel is commonly used.
In the beginning, the effect of this treated armor was quite good. In the battle against the Soviet Union, the Tiger tank, which used 100 mm surface-hardened steel as its frontal armor, withstood the attacks of many Soviet armor-piercing projectiles. The warheads of many armor-piercing projectiles were damaged by the armor surface. It was directly smashed into pieces, leaving only very shallow marks on Xijia, while ordinary cannonballs were directly bounced away.
However, there is a crisis hidden behind the brilliance on the surface, because the basic principle of surface-hardened armor is to rely on high hardness to cause fatal damage to incoming warheads to prevent penetration.
After the warhead hardness is high enough or some protective measures are taken, the advantages of surface-hardened armor are abolished.
The new armor-piercing bullet relies on its high initial strength and high hardness and high density heavy metal core, making the hardened layer of surface-hardened armor that takes a lot of man-hours to form useless. Surface-hardened armor has completely lost its survival advantage, and its complexity The time-wasting processing technology made its cost too high. The loss of efficiency and high cost made surface-hardened armor withdraw from the stage of history. However, surface-hardened armor should be said to be the earliest armor made using two materials with different physical properties, although it was not very successful. However, its status in the history of tank exhibitions still needs to be affirmed.
In the post-war years, the world has not emerged from the shadow of war. The shadow of the Cold War has once again enveloped the entire earth. The fierce arms race has begun again. As the king of the war, the tank has naturally continued to improve with the development of the two huge military machines of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
In the early post-war period, the internal structure of the tank became more reasonable, allowing the tank to thicken the main armor as much as possible without greatly increasing the weight. The physical thickness of the turret frontal armor of mainstream medium tanks in various countries generally increased, and cast armor became the mainstream. For example, the United States uses a fully cast hull and turret, the British Centurion has a semi-cast hull and a cast turret, and the Soviet Union uses a welded hull and a cast turret.
At this time, shaped armor-piercing bullets appeared. The principle is to rely on the energy of the charge itself to penetrate armor. It mainly relies on making the charge into a hollow cylindrical charge column with a tapered hole, and adding a metal cover on the surface of the conical hole charge. In this way, when it explodes, it will converge into a metal energy jet with high speed, temperature and pressure. , that is, the energy-gathering effect, destroying armor.
At that time, the space connection of tanks using increased physical thickness to strengthen defense was not yet saturated. It was almost impossible to rely solely on increasing the thickness of armor to resist armor-piercing projectiles. Especially with the emergence of anti-tank missiles, some people doubted whether tanks had already At the end of the battle, the status of the king of tank 6 battles faced an unprecedented crisis.
But tanks did not sit still and wait for death. A new type of tank, which was launched in 1964, responded to the threat of armor-piercing projectiles in a brand-new way. This tank was the epoch-making tank.
The body of this tank uses an armor plate with a multi-layer composite structure. From the outside to the inside, the structure is composed of forged steel plates, ceramic materials, high-hardness forged steel plates, glass fiber, ceramic materials and neutron-proof material layers. Although the physical thickness is only about 200 millimeters, its protective capability reaches 500 millimeters of ordinary surface-hardened steel beams, and there is no significant increase in weight. The tank ultimately did not leave the stage of history under the attack of anti-tank weapons. On the contrary, it improves its own performance, making the performance of the tank more perfect.
"A simple example can prove the excellent defensive capabilities of the front of the Shikou turret. In an experiment at the Smolensk shooting range, the Soviets used the weapons obtained from the Americans who had defected. First, they tested homogeneous The armored target plate was shot, and the result was that it could penetrate the 500 mm thick target plate. Then Tao Xiao was used to shoot a scrapped low-cost weapon loaded with ammunition and the rabbit was placed on the driver's seat. The armor kit was lowered, and after a loud noise, the missile accurately hit the left front of the turret, but it did not penetrate. The rabbit placed in the tank was also safe. After measurement, the missile only dug a hole in the tank. , and in the tanks produced later, the front of the turret was also filled with gold sand, so you can imagine its strong defensive capabilities," said Fan Wubing, the person in charge of the Armor Technology Laboratory.
Having tasted the benefits of composite armor, the Soviet Union quickly replaced all the tanks it produced with this advanced armor, including upgrading and modifying kits for old tanks. However, due to cost constraints, the expensive and powerful ceramic composite armor was ultimately not popularized in the Soviet Union's huge tank force. For example, in the Soviet tank force, as a low-end under-sword tank, its body was Simplified composite armor is used, with an outer layer of steel armor and a middle layer of fiberglass. The inner layer is steel armor. This kind of composite armor is relatively low-cost, and the overall protection effect is pretty good.
However, during this period, the power of anti-tank missiles was greatly increased due to technological improvements, which posed severe challenges to the tank's protection system. At this time, Western countries finally developed their own His own composite armor is the famous Chobham composite armor.
Chobham armor is composed of high-hardness steel, ceramic tiles inside an aluminum jacket, and flexible composite materials. In terms of ballistic resistance, its biggest highlight is that it focuses on the different effects of different materials on ballistics, so that when the armor-piercing projectile is launched, The ballistic trajectory will deflect when passing through different materials, and the flexible material used allows the material to undergo strong displacement, thereby breaking the projectile body to prevent penetration. This is similar to the effect of Tai Chi leveraging strength.
New challenges forced the Soviets to adopt new measures to maintain their advantage in the armor field, so they used a new type of ceramic composite armor on their baby tanks, using rod-shaped structures made of titanium alloy constrained ceramics, and then These are sealed into the turret of the tank, and the same may be true for the hull. Of course, the cost is also very high.
"Actually, we have very little information in this area. Regarding the latest type of tank, it obviously uses more advanced technology, but the Russians are very careful about it and there is no way to get it." The person in charge of the laboratory told Fan Wu Bian said, "But the overall idea is also very enlightening for us."
Fan Wubing nodded, he had no doubt about this. As long as the Chinese know a little bit about the principles, they can come up with better products than the original creators.
Soon, Fan Wubing was accompanied by the head of the laboratory to the design room. Here, many employees were designing composite armor, such as adjusting the material ratio, selecting ingredients of different materials for filling, etc. Most of them The design is all done in the computer.
However, domestic technology in special alloy steel did start late, although it has been catching up over the years. However, due to some reasons such as raw materials and other aspects, ideal progress has not been achieved.
Although the steel companies under Fanshi Investment Group have special alloy research laboratories, time is still short and they have not been able to develop any exciting products.