A novel approach to tessellated ceramic armour for female military personnel

The development of personal ballistic protection systems remains a central challenge in defence engineering and terminal ballistics. Modern operational scenarios demand body armour capable of defeating a broad range of threats, from low-energy fragments to armour-piercing rounds, without compromising weight or long-term wearability. In parallel, the growing presence of female personnel in operative military roles has further exposed the limitations of conventional body armour systems. These are still largely designed around male anthropometric models and often fail to properly accommodate the geometry of the female thorax. Ceramic-based armour systems, typically consisting of a hard ceramic strike face bonded to a fibre composite backing plate, are widely used for protection against high-velocity threats. In these configurations, the ceramic layer blunts, erodes, and fragments the incoming projectile, while the composite backing absorbs the residual kinetic energy through deformation and progressive fibre failure. The combined action of these two components enables levels of ballistic performance that cannot be achieved by either material independently. Despite these advantages, conventional monolithic ceramic plates present several limitations that restrict their effectiveness. Under impact, the brittle nature of the ceramic promotes the rapid formation and propagation of radial and circumferential cracks, often through the entire plate surface and reducing significantly the structural integrity after a single ballistic event. As a result, monolithic plates are particularly vulnerable to repeated impacts, which remains a critical requirement in operational scenarios. The work presented in this thesis pursues two objectives at once. The first is the design, manufacturing, and experimental evaluation of a new multilayer armour system. The second is the development of a numerical framework able to reproduce its ballistic response and to support design decisions and future optimisation. These two lines were not carried out in sequence but in parallel, and they were closely coupled: at the outset, constitutive models calibrated for the materials and configurations of interest were not available, so the predictive framework could not be applied as a ready tool but had to be built and validated as part of the work itself.