Publications

Statistics of the Hugoniot elastic limit from line VISAR

Furnish, Michael D.; Vogler, Tracy V.; Alexander, Charles S.; Reinhart, William D.; Trott, Wayne T.; Chhabildas, Lalit C.

Material heterogeneity appears to give rise to variability in the yield behavior of ceramics and metals under shock loading conditions. The line-imaging VISAR provides a way to measure this variability, which may then be quantified by Weibull statistics or other methods. Weibull methods assign a 2-parameter representation of failure phenomena and variability. We have conducted experiments with tantalum (25 and 40 μm grains) and silicon carbide (SiC-N with 5 μm grains). The tantalum HEL variability did not depend systematically on peak stress, grain size or sample thickness, although the previously observed precursor attenuation was present. SiC-N HEL variability within a single shot was approximately half that of single-point variability in a large family of shots; these results are more consistent with sample-to-sample variation than with variability due to changing shot parameters. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.