High temperature high strain rate testing with a compressive SHPB

Abstract

Both temperature and strain rate have a significant effect on the mechanical behavior of most materials. At or close to room temperature, well-designed and well-built SHPB devices can be used to produce high quality high strain rate data relatively easily, but at elevated temperatures many practical difficulties make such tests much more complicated. There is, however, an increasing interest and practical need to study and model the high strain rate behavior of materials also at high temperatures, and therefore development of sophisticated high strain rate high temperature testing devices is needed. In this paper, a fully computer controlled Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar (SHPB) testing system with a high temperature capability up to 1000 °C is described. The high temperature (HT) system is based on fast pneumatic specimen and pressure bar manipulation devices which enable heating up of the specimen only and limit the contact time of the hot specimen with cold pressure bars to 50...100 ms. Some results of the tests made with the new HT-SHPB device are also presenter in this paper.