Mechanical response and failure of High Performance Propellant (HPP) subject to uniaxial tension

Abstract

As part of a program to characterize and understand the mechanical response and failure behavior of the High Performance Propellant (HPP), uniaxial tensile tests were conducted. The mechanical properties of the HPP solid propellant subject to tension are investigated as a function of both the loading (strain) rate and the temperature. The nominal strain rate varies from 10−6 to 10−2 s−1 and the temperature varies from −50 to 50 °C. Digital image correlation (DIC) technique was used to obtain the full field deformation measurement over the sample surface, from which both the axial strain and the circumferential strain were determined, and as a result, volume changes during the uniaxial tension were studied. Some of the material parameters, e.g., Young’s modulus E, the tensile strength σ max, and uniaxial tensile strain at the maximum tensile stress ϵ max, were found to be extremely sensitive to both the strain rate and the temperature. It was also observed that during the linear portion of the uniaxial tension, the HPP is close to incompressible. But when deformation enters the nonlinear regime, volume change of the sample accelerates and such a significant volume increase during the nonlinear portion of the deformation can be attributed to the formation and extension of damage within the gage section, which lead to the macroscopic tearing failure of the material.