| We unambiguously verified the hypothesis that normal penetration in brittle materials may be represented as a bi-modal process. The first mode is governed by fundamental strength properties of the target, while the second mode is governed by the fracture kinetics. We investigated the failure response of glass under impact loading. We observed a drop in the failure wave velocity by a factor of 1/2 after unloading. While not unexpected, this drop had not been clearly observed previously. In contradiction to literature values, we observed a drop in sound speed behind the failure wave. Finally, despite the common perception that the failed material is comminuted, we observed a finite tensile strength. We proposed a new variant of the Taylor test using scaled rods to examine strain rate effects. For armor steel, we observed changes in strength greater than what would be expected from a logarithmic dependence of strength on strain rate although not enough to account for scale effects. For tungsten penetrators, we observed that smaller scale tungsten rods appeared to have more work hardening than the large scale rods which might account for scale effects. We examined the square Taylor impact problem. We showed that the square Taylor test is a new way to study shear localization under compressive-shear loading. We performed the first shock characterization of AlON. We observed that the bar impact experiment appears to differentiate between different thicknesses of ceramic tile in qualitative agreement with subscale and full scale penetration experiments. We present data supporting the lower yield strength estimate of 4.3 GPa for alumina. We performed the first bar impact characterization of AlON. |
