High Rate Plasticity under Pressure using a Windowed Pressure-Shear Impact Experiment

An experimental technique has been developed to study the strength of materials under conditions of moderate pressures and high shear strain rates. The technique is similar to the traditional pressure-shear plate-impact experiments except that window interferometry is used to measure both the normal and transverse particle velocities at a sample-window interface. Experimental and simulation results on copper and vanadium samples backed with a sapphire window will be presented to show the utility of the technique to measure flow strength under dynamic loading conditions. The samples were impacted with a Ta10W flyer at approximately 200 m/s.