Publications

Sandia National Laboratories has constructed an unyielding target at the end of its 2000-foot rocket sled track. This target is made up of approximately 5 million pounds of concrete, an embedded steel load spreading structure, and a steel armor plate face that varies from 10 inches thick at the center to 4 inches thick at the left and right edges. The target/track combination will allow horizontal impacts at regulatory speeds of very large objects, such as a full-scale rail cask, or high-speed impacts of smaller packages. The load-spreading mechanism in the target is based upon the proven design that has been in use for over 20 years at Sandia's aerial cable facility. That target, with a weight of 2 million pounds, has successfully withstood impact forces of up to 25 million pounds. It is expected that the new target will be capable of withstanding impact forces of more than 70 million pounds. During construction various instrumentation was placed in the target so that the response of the target during severe impacts can be monitored. This paper will discuss the construction of the target and provide insights on the testing capabilities at the sled track with this new target.

Typical shock testing requirements specify shock pulses of several hundred to several thousand g's, with pulse duration usually less than a few milliseconds. A requirement to qualify a shipping container to a head-on tractortrailer crash environment led to the development of a new test technique capable of low-g (< 50 g), long-duration (> 100 ms) shock pulses. This technique utilizes nylon webbing engaged in tension to shape the pulse produced by the interaction of two sleds on an indoor track. A combination of experimental and computational methodology was used to successfully develop the test technique to solve a specific testing requirement. The process used to develop the test technique is emphasized in this paper, where a prudent balance between experiment and analysis resulted in a cost effective solution. The results show that the quasi-static load-elongation behavior of the nylon webbing can be used to adequately model the dynamic behavior of the webbing, allowing design of the experimental setup with a simple computational model. The quasi-static load-elongation measurements are described along with the development of the computational model. Results of a full-scale experiment are presented, showing that the required shock pulse could be achieved with this test technique.

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