Newly Developed Unsteady Wave Sensing System for Polycarbonate

Stress-strain relationships of polycarbonate (PC) were determined over a very wide range of strain rates including shock wave regime. High-velocity plate impact tests, drop-weight tests, and quasi-static tests using universal and Instron testing machines were used for the high strain rate (107 s-1), medium strain rate (102 s-1) and low strain rate (10-4 s-1) tests, respectively. The revised unsteady wave sensing system (UWSS) for plate impact tests was newly developed to determine the stress-strain relationships and Hugoniot linear relation of PC. The system consists of a powder gun for plate impact tests and three polyvenylidene fluoride (PVDF) gauges embedded in the PC utilizing a newly developed nanosecond UWSS. As originally proposed, UWSS is aimed in obtaining experimental inputs for the Lagrangian analysis used to determine the dynamic behavior of materials. The new method to determine also the shock Hugoniot stress-strain curves is proposed for PC at medium particle velocities up to about 1 km/s. The revised, unsteady wave sensing system (M-UWSS, which we proposed before) using plate impact experiment with three PVDF gauges embedded is applied to construct stress-strain curves under shock loading up to Hugoniot stress σH and Hugoniot strain εH. Linear relationship between shock velocity Us and particle velocity Up: Us = C0 + S x Up, where C0 and S are material constants, is used to determine the constant S, since the constant C0 is determined as bulk sound velocity at ambient pressure. By using the momentum conservation and the mass conservation relations, S = (1 - C0 / CH) /εH, is derived from the linear relationship described above, where , ρ is density and CH ≈ Us.