Nowadays, tungsten heavy alloy is increasingly adopted as the raw material to make parts of military products, such as bullet, armor and shells, shrapnel head, grenade, hunting gun, bullet warheads, bulletproof vehicles, tank panzers, cannons, firearms, etc. A major use for tungsten heavy alloy is in kinetic energy penetrators, where they are in direct competition with depleted uranium (DU). Recent investigations conducted at the Army Research Laboratory show that DU’s superior properties resulted from its ability to localize shear during ballistic penetration events. Therefore, it was argued that if localized shear can be imparted to tungsten heavy alloys, these alloys would exhibit penetration performance matching that of depleted uranium (which had become an environmental problem).
