Behavior of Brittle Materials under Shock-Wave Loading

Abstract

Interest in the response of brittle materials to dynamic loading is related to many applications including explosive excavation of rocks, design of hard ceramic armor, meteorite impacts on spacecraft windows, impact of condensed particles on turbine blades, etc. When a brittle material is subjected to an impact or explosive attack, inelastic deformation, fracture, and fragmentation occur under conditions of three-dimensional stress, where at least one stress component is compressive. It is known that the behavior of brittle materials under quasi-static compression is characterized by such features as compressive fracture, dilatancy, and pressure-sensitive yielding which do not permit the use of classical elastic-plastic constitutive models. Recent review papers (Bombolakis, 1973, Kranz, 1983, and Wang and Shrive, 1995) show that, although the fiacture and fragmentation of brittle materials under tension is more or less clear, the governing mechanisms of compressive fracture are not quite clear even for quasi-static conditions. The rapid application of load can also introduce the effect of rate dependencies which make the problem even more complicated.