DYMAT 2009 (2009) 941-946
DOI: 10.1051/dymat/2009132

Catastrophic rupture of heterogeneous brittle materials under impact loading

H.Y. Wang¹, J. Shu^{1, 2}, Y.L. Bai¹, M.F. Xia³ and F.J. Ke<sup>4

1</sup>  LNM, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
²  Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039, PR China
³  Department of Physics, Peking Universiyt, Beijing 100871, China
⁴  Department of Physics, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

Published online: 15 September 2009

Abstract
The catastrophic failure of heterogeneous brittle materials under impact loading is not fully understood. To describe the catastrophic failure behavior of heterogeneous brittle materials under impact loading, an elasto-statistical-brittle (ESB) model is proposed in this paper. The ESB model characterizes the disordered inhomogeneity of material at mesoscopic scale with the statistical description of the shear strength of mesoscopic units. If the applied shear stress reaches the strength, the mesoscopic unit fails, which causes degradation in the shear modulus of the material. With a simplified ESB model, the failure wave in brittle material under uni-axial compression is analyzed. It is shown that the failure wave is a wave of strain or particle velocity resulted from the catastrophic fracture in an elastically stressed brittle media when the impact velocity reaches a critical value. In addition, the failure wave causes an increase in the rear surface velocity, which agrees well with experimental observations. The critical condition to generate failure wave and the speed of failure wave are also obtained.

© EDP Sciences 2009