Impact Response Characterization in Composite Plates—Experimental Validation

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study for the normalized low-velocity impact response of composite plates. It is demonstrated that a characterization diagram that shows the relationship of three non-dimensional parameters with the normalized maximum impact force can be used to fully characterize the response. With the governing non-dimensional parameters obtained experimentally, it is shown that impact tests having the same non-dimensional parameters, have dynamic similarity and the same non-dimensional response. Furthermore, the experiments can be placed in appropriate dynamic regions in which simplified dynamic models can be used to predict the response.