Revisiting energy dissipation due to elastic waves at impact of spheres on large thick plates

Abstract

In the present study, the model of Hunter (1957) [5] is recalculated using Reed's (1985) [6] more accurate force-time approximation of the perfect elastic impact at which the result of Reed is crucially corrected. The original result from Hunter (commonly known as Hunter loss) underestimates the energy dissipation due to elastic waves in large thick plates by almost 15%. The “corrected Hunter loss” shows an approximately 97% high congruence with the result of FEM simulations of Wu (2001) [7] for the impact between a small steel sphere and a large thick steel plate. Furthermore, the validity of the model of Hunter is discussed.For a comprehensive estimation of the influence of elastic waves, a large number of experimental impact tests have been carried out at which different material combinations of the impacting bodies have been chosen at low impact velocities (0.5–2.3m/s). Depending on the material combination and impact velocity, the corrected Hunter loss has a contribution of less than 1% up to about 70% of the total energy dissipation for the performed as well as the evaluated experiments (from literature).