Chobham armor
A Chobham Armor is a composite or Kompositpanzerung of different materials. The items are made of ceramic - composite material , which in sandwich construction is inserted as the tiles between two steel plates, or has at least a steel back plate. Therefore, vehicles that are protected by such armor do not have round shapes. The composite panels are located one behind the other in a steel container. The end of the armor system is usually a layer of a shatterproof material such as Kevlar .
General
Details of modern military technology are generally kept confidential. Both companies that manufacture such armor and soldiers who repair it are bound to the strictest confidentiality. Therefore one can only speculate about the exact structure of the armor. Possible ceramic materials that can be used for this purpose are: aluminum oxide , silicon carbide and boron carbide .
The Chobham Armor itself represents a development of the tank factory in Chobham Common , which fall in the Second World War was built.
A further development of the Chobham armor is the Dorchester armor. Depleted uranium deposits were also incorporated into this armor in addition to the Chobham armor . This armor is used on the last models of the Challenger 2 main battle tank.
Composite armor is an adaptation to modern weapon systems that cut through simple steel like "a warm knife through butter". Projectiles that work on the principle of the simple explosion have been replaced by HEAT ( High Explosive Anti Tank ) ammunition in armor-piercing weapons ; the explosion of the shaped charge forms a metal spike that penetrates the armor. If such a sting hits an armor protected by Chobham armor, the ceramic tablets incorporated will burst as a result of the impact. The resulting (flying around) ceramic parts destroy the geometry of the spike. The penetration is reduced by up to 96% compared to a steel plate of the same weight. The deeper metal layers further absorb the kinetic energy. With the help of composite armor, the probability of destroying a tank with a shaped charge is drastically reduced.
Due to the increased use of armor-piercing ammunition without warheads, the so-called KE penetrators ( kinetic-energy penetrator ), which have extremely high impact speeds with the smallest possible impact area in relation to the mass, it became necessary to increase the strength of the armor. This is achieved by additional uranium or tungsten layers . The armor of the US M1 Abrams main battle tank contains, in addition to the actual Chobham armor, a layer of depleted uranium; other tanks of the last generation use a tungsten alloy for this, with or without Chobham armor in the strict sense.
Up until the Second Gulf War , the Chobham armor technology was considered to have been tried and tested, as only individual tanks of the coalition forces were destroyed despite multiple impacts by HEAT and KE ammunition. During the Third Gulf War , individual M1 Abrams main battle tanks were destroyed several times ; the actual Chobham armor of the coalition troops' tanks was seldom penetrated by the enemy. Because of the very high costs, many parts of a tank are not protected with Chobham.
literature
- Jeffrey J. Swab, Dongming Zhu, Waltraud M. Kriven (Eds.): Advances in Ceramic Armor. A Collection of Papers Presented at the 29th International Conference on Advanced Ceramics and Composites, January 23-28, 2005, Cocoa Beach, Florida (= Ceramic Engineering and Science Proceedings. Vol. 26, No. 7). American Ceramic Society, Westerville OH 2005, ISBN 1-57498-237-0 .