Why does necking ignore notches in dynamic tension?

Abstract

Recent experimental work has revealed that necking of tensile specimens, subjected to dynamic loading, is a deterministic phenomenon, governed by the applied boundary conditions. Furthermore it was shown that the potential sited, dictated by the boundary conditions, may prevail even in the presence of a notch, thus necking may occur away of the notched region. The present paper combines experimental and numerical work to address this issue. Specifically, it is shown that the dynamic tensile failure locus is dictated by both the applied velocity boundary condition and the material mechanical properties, specifically strain-rate sensitivity and strain-rate hardening. It is shown that at sufficiently high impact velocities, the flows stress in the notch vicinity becomes quite higher than in the rest of the specimen, so that while the former resists deformation, it transfers the load to the latter, resulting in the formation of a local neck and failure away from the notch. Small local perturbations in the material properties are shown to be sufficient to stabilize the structure under local failure until a neck forms elsewhere. While the physical observations are quite counterintuitive with respect to the engineering views of stress concentrator's effect, the present work rationalizes those observations and also provides information for the designers of dynamically tensioned structures that may contain notches or similar flaws.