The failure mechanisms through fragmentation and their effect on the Al2024 alloy and its temper condition when subjected to high strain rates experienced in aerospace and defence applications are scarce in the literature. The present work deals with the investigation of as-received Al2024- T3 and its temper condition Al2024-T3 + T6 subjected to the ballistic impact on single stage gun in the velocity range of 50–250 m/s for their deformation behaviour. Three types of nose-shaped projectiles- blunt, hemispherical and ogive were triggered onto 3 mm target plates in the normal direction. The difficulty in retrieving the fragments during the experimental investigations motivated the perception of the numerical analyses. Two approaches such as the Conventional Erosion Model (CEM) and Node Separation Model (NSM) on LS DYNA software were developed and adopted. The residual velocities, Ballistic Limit Velocities (BLV), Kinetic Energy Absorption (KEA) and their deformation mechanisms were compared and analysed for the two target alloy conditions to obtain better ballistic-resistant material. Ogive projectile has shown to be the best penetrator for the alloy materials and additionally, the KEA for the tempered condition was higher compared to the Al2024-T3 and Al2024-T3 + T6 just above the BLV. The NSM methodology for fragmentation analysis has been proved to be a promising technique and the estimates were comparable and realistic to those of experimentally obtained estimates. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd