Shear and tensile failure of thin aluminium plates struck by cylindrical and spherical indenters

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Shear and tensile failure of thin aluminium plates struck by cylindrical and spherical indenters

Liu, B. / Villavicencio, R. / Guedes Soares, C.

Experimental drop weight impact tests have been performed to examine the failure characteristics of small-scale clamped rectangular aluminium plates struck by a mass with cylindrical and spherical indenters. The laboratory results are compared with numerical simulations. Six plate specimens are impacted at the same kinetic energy in order to study the influence of the shape and the diameter of the indenter. The experiments are conducted using a fully instrumented impact testing machine. The obtained force–displacement responses show a good agreement with the simulations performed by the LS-DYNA finite element solver. The strain hardening of the material is defined using experimental data of quasi-static tensile tests and the critical failure strain is evaluated measuring the thickness and the width at fracture of the tensile test pieces. The results show that the impact response and the failure mode of the specimens are highly sensitive to the geometry of the indenters. The failure modes are described by the matrix of the infinitesimal strain tensors and the shape of the deformation of the first failing element. In addition, the process of initiation and propagation of the material fracture is presented.