The influence of shock loading on material properties and dynamic damage evolution

Many commercial and defense applications require structural metals for extreme environments. Specifically, automotive, aerospace, and infrastructure applications need materials with damage tolerance during dynamic loading. To this end, many studies have examined dynamic deformation and damage evolution. These studies have shown that kinetics of loading are critically important to damage evolution of bulk metals. Particularly, in dynamic loading environments in which a shock wave is imparted to the metal, kinetic and spatial effects based on shock wave shape play important roles in damage. These studies also show that depending on crystal structure, shock loading can alter the subsequent properties of a material significantly. However, while these phenomena are gaining acceptance in the dynamic damage community, the ability to predict these phenomena is limited. Here, the influence of dynamic loading across strain rates 103–106/s will be discussed. The role of test platforms and crystallography to examine the influence of kinetics will be tied to changes observed in deformation and damage evolution. It can be shown that isolating the influence of spatial and kinetic effects during dynamic loading is critical to understanding dynamic damage evolution and with this understanding, capabilities for predicting dynamic damage evolution can be advanced.