The ballistic response of armor has been widely used to evaluate its feasibility and advantages as a protective structure. To obtain the ballistic performance and ballistic limitations of composite armor, a type of ultra–high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) composite armor is designed, which is composed of UHMWPE laminates and steel face sheets of Q235. The total thickness of the armor is 53 mm, with an in–plane dimension of 300 mm × 300 mm. Then, an experimental study of the ballistic impact response of composite armor subject to a typical ogive–nose projectile was carried out. In the velocity range of 501.1 to 1026.1 m/s, the 14.5 mm caliber armor–piercing projectile could penetrate through the composite armor. At the velocity of 433.3 m/s, the A–P projectile was embedded in the armor, leaving a bulge mark on the back sheet. Therefore, 467.2 m/s is taken as the ballistic limit of the armor under the impact of the ogive–nose projectile. In addition, a corresponding numerical simulation model is also established to predict the ballistic limit of the projectile. The numerical predictions are consistent with the experimental results. The ballistic limit obtained from the numerical simulation results is 500 m/s, which is acceptable with a relative error of 7.02%. The failure mechanism of the composite armor is also obtained. Petaling is the main dominant failure mode for both face sheets, while delamination and shear failure dominate the penetration process of UHMWPE laminates. Finally, the perforation mechanism of composite armor under the impact of an A–P projectile is analyzed with theoretical models to predict the residual velocity, the work performed during the perforation, and the resisting stress of σ_s in the cavity–expansion model. The experimental and numerical simulation results can provide necessary data in the analysis of the composite structure’s dynamic response under the impact of sharp head penetrators. The research results present the ballistic performance, failure mechanism, and ballistic limit of the composite armor under the impact of a typical ogive–nose projectile, which can be significant in the design of composite armor in the areas of ship shield, fortifications protection, and bulletproof structures against threats from sharp head penetrators.

It is assumed that the drift parameter is dependent on the acceleration variables and the diffusion coefficient remains the same across the whole accelerated degradation test (ADT) in most of the literature based on Wiener process. However, the diffusion coefficient variation would also become obvious in some applications with the stress increasing. Aiming at the phenomenon, the paper concludes that both the drift parameter and the diffusion parameter depend on stress variables based on the invariance principle of failure mechanism and Nelson assumption. Accordingly, constant stress accelerated degradation process (CSADP) and step stress accelerated degradation process (SSADP) with random effects are modeled. The unknown parameters in the established model are estimated based on the property of degradation and degradation increment, separately for CASDT and SSADT, by the maximum likelihood estimation approach with measurement error. In addition, the simulation steps of accelerated degradation data are provided and simulated step stress accelerated degradation data is designed to validate the proposed model compared to other models. Finally, a case study of CSADT is conducted to demonstrate the benefits of our model in the practical engineering.

In this paper, an improved PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) algorithm is proposed and applied to the infrared image enhancement. The contrast of infrared image is enhanced while the image details are preserved. A new exponential center symmetry inertia weight function is constructed and the local optimal solution jumping mechanism is introduced to make the algorithm consider both global search and local search. A new image enhancement method is proposed based on the advantages of bi-histogram equalization algorithm and dual-domain image decomposition algorithm. The fitness function is constructed by using five kinds of image quality evaluation factors, and the parameters are optimized by the proposed PSO algorithm, so that the parameters are determined to enhance the image. Experiments showed that the proposed PSO algorithm has good performance, and the proposed image enhancement method can not only improve the contrast of the image, but also preserve the details of the image, which has a good visual effect.

To study the dynamic response of UHMW-PE composite armor under ballistic impact, two kinds of UHMW-PE composite armors are designed. Both of them are composed of UHMW-PE laminates and steel face sheets of Q235. The blunt projectile is made of 35CrMnSiA, with a cylinder shape. By numerical simulation, the dynamic response and deformation of composite armors are obtained under the penetration of the projectile. With the increase of impact velocity, the penetration depth increases nearly linearly, with a more severe tendency of swaging in the projectile. Then, experiments are carried out to validate the numerical simulation results. Based on a ballistic gun with a caliber of 14.5 mm, the projectiles are fired with a velocity from 680 m/s to 1300 m/s. The penetration into the composite armor can be divided into an initial shear plugging stage and the following bulging and delamination stage. Based on the theoretical analysis, the shear strength in the shear plugging stage can be estimated. Associated with typical experimental results, numerical simulation is suitable to predict the bulging characteristics of the composite armor. The failure mode of the composite armors under the impact of blunt projectiles is determined, and the failure mechanism is analyzed. The penetration results in the experiment agree well with the numerical simulation results, which validate the correctness of the numerical simulation models. The research results can be significant in the design of composite armor with UHMW-PE laminates.

Outdoor haze has adverse impact on outdoor image quality, including contrast loss and poor visibility. In this paper, a novel dehazing algorithm based on the decomposition strategy is proposed. It combines the advantages of the two-dimensional variational mode decomposition (2DVMD) algorithm and dark channel prior. The original hazy image is adaptively decomposed into low-frequency and high-frequency images according to the image frequency band by using the 2DVMD algorithm. The low-frequency image is dehazed by using the improved dark channel prior, and then fused with the high-frequency image. Furthermore, we optimize the atmospheric light and transmittance estimation method to obtain a defogging effect with richer details and stronger contrast. The proposed algorithm is compared with the existing advanced algorithms. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms.