High-Pressure Range Shock Wave Data for Syntactic Foams

Syntactic foams [SF] are a porous composite material that results from the mixture of Hollow Glass Micro Spheres [HGMS] with a polymeric binder. Beyond a set of technological advantages over the polymer considered alone, SF present as an essential feature the possibility to control in wide limits the amount, the shape and the size of the porous and by that reason is being used for benchmarking in the area of the shock wave [SW] behaviour of porous materials. In this paper SW loading experiments of SF samples were performed in order to assess the high-pressure range Hugoniot equation of state as a function of the SF initial density. Hugoniot data was assessed coupling the SW velocity within the SF samples with the SW velocity in a reference material or with manganin gauge results. The results obtained present a significant variation with the initial specific mass and can be described with appreciable precision by the Thouvenin/Hofmann model while the concordance between the experimental results and the Gr\"{u}neisen model seems to be very dependent on the Gr\"{u}neisen coefficient values.