The saturated impulse of fully clamped square plates subjected to linearly decaying pressure pulse

Abstract

Saturated impulse refers to the critical value, beyond which the deflection of a beam or plate under pulse loading will no longer increase with further applied load. Previous studies have explored the saturated impulse for structures under rectangular pressure pulse loading. The present paper investigates the saturated impulse for fully clamped square plates subjected to linearly decaying pressure pulse, which is closer to the pulse produced by explosive loading. Both rigid-plastic model and elastic-plastic model are employed to study the saturated duration, saturated impulse, saturated deflection, etc. The results indicate that the saturated impulse exists if the decaying duration is greater than a certain value (i.e. the minimum decaying duration), and a saturation regime map is constructed accordingly. To facilitate engineering designs, an empirical expression for saturated duration is provided based on the elastic-plastic numerical results. In addition, a method is proposed to predict the deflection of fully clamped square plates, which replaces the linearly decaying pressure pulse with an equivalent rectangular pressure pulse. Inspired by Youngdahl's pioneering work, the proposed method has explicit physical meaning and wide range of application.