Abstract

In the current paper, a novel experimental methodology to characterize the contact behavior on thin plates under bending is presented. The method is based on the experimental measurement of the indentation observed during contact experiments. Tests were conducted using aluminum thin plates and a steel sphere to evaluate the effect of thickness and bending during contact. For this purpose, a non-contact optical technique, 3D Digital Image Correlation (3D-DIC), has been employed to measure the out-of-plane displacements experienced at the rear face of the specimens (opposite where the contact is occurring). An indirect measurement of the experimental contact law is obtained for different plate thicknesses (2 mm, 3 mm, 4 mm, 5 mm and 6 mm) as the contact load increases. An energy balance performed during contact experiments made it possible to evaluate and quantify the applied energy to generate bending and contact deformation. When the specimen thickness increases from 2 mm to 6 mm, contact deformation reaches higher values from the total applied energy. In addition, it is also possible to evaluate the portion of the elastically recovered energy for contact and bending deformation during the unloading. It has been observed that thicker specimens show a lower elastic energy recovery due to bending and a higher elastic energy recovery due to contact. Results clearly show how the ratio between absorbed and applied energy changes as the specimen thickness increases, highlighting the relevance of the proposed method for the characterization of contact behavior in thin plates.

Highlights

  • The analysis of structural damage caused by an impact or quasi-static event on a structure is a widely studied problem

  • When half-space conditions are not achieved, the experimental determination of a static contact law is crucial to the evaluation of the material contact behavior since measured indentation values are strongly affected by the specimen deflection during the test [4,6]

  • The purpose of this paper is to present a novel experimental methodology to characterize the contact behavior of thin plates with different thicknesses using a full-field technique

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Summary

Introduction

The analysis of structural damage caused by an impact or quasi-static event on a structure is a widely studied problem. Hertz adopted some assumptions for the calculation of local deformations, assuming that each body could be regarded as an elastic half-space. Besides this main assumption, many efforts have been done to consider the effect of permanent deformation. When half-space conditions are not achieved, the experimental determination of a static contact law is crucial to the evaluation of the material contact behavior since measured indentation values are strongly affected by the specimen deflection during the test [4,6]

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