The present paper deals with the development of a facility for ballistic impact testing of materials for aerospace, automotive and defence applications. In order to validate this setup, experiments have been conducted on commercial grade 1100 aluminium alloy plates of 1 mm thickness with projectiles of four different nose shapes. The impact and residual velocity and the penetration process of all the test cases are recorded using a high-speed video camera. Additionally, with the aid of a general LS-DYNA-based numerical procedure, simulations have been carried out for all the above test cases. The numerical results are found to match well with the experimental observations.