Armour-piercing discarding sabot (APDS) is the mainstream of kinetic energy armor-piercing projectile launched by tank gun, and it’s an improved type of traditional armor-piercing projectile to improve the damage effect.

A ferrule made of light metal is sheathed on a tungsten alloy armor-piercing core that smaller than the main gun bore. The ferrule caliber is the same as the main gun. When launching, the light metal ferrule falls off while the tungsten core continues to fly, which is to give attention to the need for large caliber tank guns to launch high speed shells and to penetrate armor with small caliber shells. This kind of projectile's armor-piercing core should be no more than 1:7 in diameter, so that it can be fired with a line gun.

 

 

Tungsten alloy APDS warhead adopts the principle of shelling and the new structure and new material of high-density tungsten alloy. It has properties of high velocity, low trajectory extension, short flight time, high accuracy, and great penetrativeness, etc, which can effectively deal with the fast moving target. Its core section density is large, which is contrary to that of hard steel core or tungsten carbide bullet core during penetration. Tungsten alloy armor-piercing core can be well developed, and with splash piercing, it has excellent secondary penetration. The effect of armour-piercing on large angle, sandwich and multi-layer composite armor is more obvious. It has been widely adopted in military.

 

The typical structure of tungsten core APDS discarding sabot warhead consists of heart, front support (top support), the bottom support and obturation ring. In the bore, the bottom support is wrapped with a projectile core, which moves along the barrel under the action of gunpowder and gas, to make the lighter warhead have high initial speed and rotational speed. After out of the gun, the bottom support falls off, and the core flies to the target. The armor-piercing core is a piercing element made of tungsten alloy. Because the proportion of tungsten alloy is 18g/cm3, which is 2.3 times as steel (7.8g/cm3), so the section density of the core is large, which is helpful to improve the speed of storage and the penetration ability of the steel plate.

 

Tungsten heavy alloy’s the most prominent feature is the high proportion, which is also called high density. In addition, tungsten alloy has high temperature resistant, and good thermal stability. It will produce a lot of heat in the process of flight penetrator with air friction. If the filler in a projectile has bad thermal stability, it will stick together and will not achieve armor-piercing. Tungsten alloy makes the armor-piercing plays its proper function very well.