On the Use of SHPB Techniques to Determine the Dynamic Behavior of Ceramics

Ceramics are hard and brittle and typically exhibit higher compressive strength than metals. Because most of the ceramics reveal only elastic strains to failure، accurate measurement of these strains using the traditional SHPB technique is often not a trivial task. In this paper، the limitations of this technique for testing ceramics and the modifications necessary such as strain gaging the specimen، sandwiching the specimen between high-strength impedance matching inserts to avoid indentation into the bars and also using the “momentum-trap” assembly to avoid the reloading of the specimen are expressed. Other topics discussed in this paper include maximum strain rate that can be obtained in ceramics using an SHPB، the necessity of incident pulse shaping، using a tapered striker، specimen design considerations، and the effectiveness of the proposed modifications on the strain gage records by simulating in finite – element code ABAQUS/Explicit