Objective  The paper aims to explore the influence of warhead's nose shape on penetrating into homogeneous metallic plates.

  Methods  A series of armor-piercing penetration test were performed by launching sharp-and blunt-nosed projectile from 92 mm smoothbore gun to impact the Q345B and 921A steel-made target plates. By recording the initial and residual velocity measurements of warhead before and after penetrating into the target plates using target net and high-speed video camera, the failure modes as well as damage modes respectively related to the plates and projectile after penetration test were analyzed, and thus an improved estimation method was established for calculating residual velocity of different nose shapes of armor-piercing projectile penetration.

  Results  The results indicate that the warhead's nose shape pose a significant impacts on both the damage mode of pierced plate and the conversion between various types of steel plate for the purpose of obtaining equivalent ballistic performance. In terms of damage characteristics, the petal failure of target plate were a dominant mode after penetration by sharp-nosed projectile, while blunt-nosed projectile mainly contributed to punching shear failure of the plate. In contrast with B.K Belkin formula for calculating the residual velocity of the armor-piercing projectile penetrated into the plate, the proposed improved Thomoson's formula in this paper were in better agreement with test results.

  Conclusion  The results show that the proposed method are adaptable for the following similar estimation of the armor-piercing performance, and provide a basis for the further research on the large-mass warhead of penetrating into the metallic plate.