The dynamic plastic behavior of fully clamped rectangular plates

Abstract

An experimental investigation was undertaken in order to study the behavior of fully-clamped rectangular plates when subjected to uniformly distributed impulsive velocities. The total energy of the dynamic loads was sufficiently large to cause plastic flow of the plate material and maximum permanent deflections from 0.2 to nearly seven times the corresponding plate thicknesses. All the rectangular plates had the same aspect ratio (B/L = 0.593) but various thicknesses (H), and were made from either hot-rolled mild steel or aluminum 6061-T6. The permanent deformed profiles of the plates are similar to the shape of the velocity field used by Wood [11] for calculating the minimum upper bound to the collapse pressure of a fully-clamped rectangular plate loaded with a uniformly distributed time-independent pressure. It is observed that a modification of the bending only prediction of Martin [13] provides adequate engineering estimates of the maximum permanent deflections up to the order of one-half of the corresponding plate thickness. For larger deflections, it is necessary to include the influence of geometry changes; and in the case of mild steel, material strain-rate sensitivity as well.