The bulletproof vest is vital equipment to stop bullets from penetrating the body. The vest comes with a ballistic panel that can absorb the energy from the ballistic impact. Due to excellent impact resistance and high strength-to-weight ratio, Kevlar fibers composites are widely used for designing a ballistic panel in bulletproof vest body armor to avoid penetration. In this study, the research aims to investigate the ballistic impact behavior on a ballistic panel of Kevlar/Epoxy by using different fibers ply orientation to increase the ballistic impact performance. A finite element analysis using non-linear dynamic simulation was developed in commercial software Abaqus/Explicit to analyze the performance of impact characteristics in penetration depth, damage criteria, and energy-absorbing capacity. The simulation results show that the fibers ply orientation sequence of [0/90/0/90]2sym with 4 mm panel thickness has produced the highest energy absorption of 1523.7 J with least depth penetration of 2.12 mm for the 9 mm bullet traveling at 358 m/s and produce a lowest Hashin’s damage criteria with the value of 0.40. The finding shows that the ply orientation of Kevlar/Epoxy composite ballistic panel has excellent potential in bulletproof body armor application for minimizing the effect of blunt force trauma with less expensive materials usage and light weight ballistic panel.
