Here we present a methodology for the dynamic characterization of tensile specimens at intermediate strain rates using a high-speed servo-hydraulic load frame. Procedures for strain gauge instrumentation and analysis, as well as for digital image correlation strain measurements on the specimens, are also defined.
The mechanical response of a material under dynamic load is typically different than its behavior under static conditions; therefore, the common quasistatic equipment and procedures used for material characterization are not applicable for materials under dynamic loads. The dynamic response of a material depends on its deformation rate and is broadly categorized into high (i.e., greater than 200/s), intermediate (i.e., 10−200/s) and low strain rate regimes (i.e., below 10/s). Each of these regimes calls for specific facilities and testing protocols to ensure the reliability of the acquired data. Due to the limited access to high-speed servo-hydraulic facilities and validated testing protocols, there is a noticeable gap in the results at the intermediate strain rate. The current manuscript presents a validated protocol for the characterization of different materials at these intermediate strain rates. Strain gauge instrumentation and digital image correlation protocols are also included as complimentary modules to extract the utmost level of detailed data from every single test. Examples of raw data, obtained from a variety of materials and test setups (e.g., tensile and shear) is presented and the analysis procedure used to process the output data is described. Finally, the challenges of dynamic characterization using the current protocol, along with the limitations of the facility and methods of overcoming potential problems are discussed.
Most materials demonstrate some degree of strain rate dependency in their mechanical behavior1 and, therefore, mechanical testing conducted only at quasistatic strain rates is not suitable to determine the material properties for dynamic applications. The strain rate dependency of materials is typically investigated using five types of mechanical testing systems: conventional screw drive load frames, servo-hydraulic systems, high-rate servo-hydraulic systems, impact testers, and Hopkinson bar systems1. Split Hopkinson bars have been a common facility for the dynamic characterization of materials for the past 50 years2. There have also been efforts to modify Hopkinson bars to test at intermediate and lower strain rates. However, these facilities are typically more suitable for the high strain rate characterizations of the material (i.e., usually greater than 200/s). There is a gap in the literature on the strain rate characterization of material properties at intermediate strain rates in the range of 10−200/s (i.e., between quasistatic and high strain rate results obtained from split Hopkinson bars3), which is due to the limited access to facilities and a lack of reliable procedures of intermediate strain rate material testing.
A high-speed servo-hydraulic load frame applies load to the specimen at a constant and predefined velocity. These load frames benefit from a slack adaptor, which, in tensile tests, allows the crosshead to reach the desired velocity before the loading starts. The slack adaptor allows the head to travel a certain distance (e.g., 0.1 m) to reach the target velocity and then starts applying the load to the specimen. High-speed servo-hydraulic load frames typically perform tests under displacement control mode and maintain a constant actuator velocity to produce constant engineering strain rates3.
Techniques for measuring specimen elongation are generally classified as either contact or noncontact techniques4. Contact techniques include the use of instruments such as clip-on extensometers, while laser extensometers are employed for noncontact measurements. Since contact extensometers are prone to inertia influences, they are not suitable for dynamic tests; noncontact extensometers do not suffer from this problem.
Digital image correlation (DIC) is an optical, non-contact, full-field strain measurement technique, which is an alternative approach to strain gauging to measure strain/load and overcome some of the challenges (e.g., the ringing phenomenon) associated with dynamic material characterization5. Resistance strain gauges can suffer from limitations such as a limited area of measurement, a limited range of elongation, and limited mounting methods, whereas DIC is always capable of providing a full-field strain measurement from the specimen surface during the experiment.
The presented procedure describes the use of a high-speed servo-hydraulic load frame along with DIC and can be used as a complementary document to the recently developed standard guidelines6 to clarify the details of the experimental procedure. The section on the servo-hydraulic load frame can be followed for a variety of test setups (e.g., tensile, compressive, and shear) and even with common quasistatic load frames as well, and, therefore, covers a vast range of facilities. Furthermore, the DIC section may be applied separately to any type of mechanical or thermal tests, with minor modifications.
1. Specimen preparation
2. Start-up procedure
3. Setup of the strain gauges
4. Mounting the test specimen
5. DIC setup preparation
6. Running the test
7. Shutdown procedure
8. Data analysis
The duration of a dynamic test is typically comparable to the time required for the stress waves to travel a round trip over the length of the load train (i.e. grips, specimen, and loading) system1. A dynamic test is valid if the number and amplitude of stress waves during a dynamic test is controlled so that a dynamic equilibrium is achieved, and the specimen experiences a homogeneous deformation at an almost constant strain rate. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) draft SAE J2749 standard8 calls for at least 10 elastic reflected waves to propagate through the specimen gauge length prior to the specimen yield point. Higher natural frequency systems usually have ringing oscillations (i.e. oscillations of the signal, usually in response to a step input) with lower amplitudes. This ringing phenomenon is the main challenge in a dynamic test at medium to high strain rates. The level of ringing (i.e. frequency and amplitude of the oscillating signal) determines whether the raw load data obtained from the load frame are acceptable or not. Figure 1 shows examples of the load signals for two different tests. In both tests, the load obtained from the load frame is compared to the load calculated based on the strain gauge output installed on the tab section of the specimens. Although both these tests were performed properly, the load data directly extracted from the load frame force link cannot be used for the case shown in Figure 1b. In this case, using an alternative load measurement technique, such as tab section strain gauging, is necessary; whereas, the raw load data from the load frame (shown in Figure 1a) has good agreement with the strain gauge loads. In such cases, further tests may be performed without installing tab section strain gauges and the load can be directly read from the load frame force link. The ringing phenomenon has been previously observed by other researchers3,9,10,11. The amplitude and frequency of the oscillations are determined based on parameters such as the specimen material, geometry, and strain rate, and when the combination of all these factors leads to minor ringing, the raw data is used directly or, if necessary, after applying minor smoothing techniques such as filtering.
A typical example of DIC results for a dogbone aluminum specimen is shown in Figure 2. The strain field evolution with time on the entire gauge section is shown in this figure. The specimen was fixed at the bottom grip, and the top grip applied tension. In this test, the high-speed camera had a frame rate of 50,000 Hz and captured around 100 images during the test, but the images shown in this figure are 0.4 ms apart. The uniform strain within a given cross-section of the specimen shows the proper loading and data analysis during the test. The loss of DIC correlation in the last image was due to severe necking, which resulted in paint flaking, and was unavoidable immediately before the failure at the vicinity of the failure zone.
Figure 3 illustrates the stress-strain curves obtained from DIC and from the load frame crosshead displacement data. This figure shows the average stress-strain in the entire gauge section and is only presented to demonstrate the validity of the techniques and the good agreement between the results. When studying the local necking in the gauge section through DIC, the results cannot be compared with the average strains obtained over the entire gauge section. During the necking phenomenon, most of the deformation occurs at the necking region and the rest of the gauge section does not stretch but moves almost as a rigid body. Therefore, when calculating the average strain over the gauge section, this local stretch in the necking area is assigned to the entire gauge section with a longer length, compared to the length of the necking zone, and will result in a lower failure strain.
Figure 1: Comparison of load obtained from the load frame force link and calculated from the strain gauge. The ringing phenomenon in the force link data (dotted blue line) for case (A) is acceptable and for case (B) is not acceptable. Panels (A) and (B) show examples of experimental results for two tests with different samples (e.g. material, dimension, etc.) and strain rate. In each figure, the load data obtained from the load frame (dotted blue) and calculated from strain gauge readouts (solid red) are illustrated. The minor level of oscillation (i.e. ringing) in the load frame data in panel (A) demonstrates that this test does not require strain gauge instrumentation, but the severe ringing shown in panel (B) makes the strain gauge instrumentation necessary. Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.
Figure 2: Strain field in the gauge section of an aluminum dogbone specimen during the test. The strain values are in m/m and the images are 0.4 ms apart. The DIC results on the gauge section of a metallic dogbone specimen are shown in this figure. Five different snapshots (out of the 100 images taken) are presented to demonstrate the evolution of strain and specimen stretching with time. The legend of all images is also shown to define the strain level associated to each color. Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.
Figure 3: Comparison of the load frame and DIC extracted average stress-strain curves over the entire gauge section. The stress-strain curves determined from the load frame results (dotted blue) and extracted from DIC results (solid red) are shown here. Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.
The raw data obtained from the experiment is influenced by the specimen geometry and strain gauges location on the specimen. The load data in low strain rate dynamic tests acquired by a piezo-electric load washer incorporated into the load frame at higher strain rates (Bruce et al.3 suggested > 10/s, while for Wang et al.9 reported this limit to be 100/s) typically suffer from large amplitude oscillations due to dynamic waves associated with the loading. As shown in Figure 1a combination of specimen material, geometry and strain rate may render the load washer signal impractical due to a high level of noise. Hence, alternative approaches of load reading must be considered, from which installing a strain gauge on the tab section of the specimen is the most common3. In order to calculate the load from the measured strain data, it is critical to ensure the tab section (where the load calculation strain gauge is installed) remains in the elastic deformation regime during the test. Also as explained in the protocol section, in order to ensure the absence of any boundary effects (i.e. due to the Saint-Venant's Principle) the strain gauges are required to be installed far from the grip section (where they are affected locally by load), or the gauge section (where a change in geometry disturbs the uniform flow of stress), otherwise finite element analysis are needed to compensate for the stress concentration factor4. During the data analysis step, employing a variety of filtering techniques, such as Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) and averaging, in order to remove or reduce the noise level is also reported12. However, this approach runs the risk of possibly masking the yielding behavior and, therefore, is not recommended.
As the main challenge in intermediate strain rate mechanical tests, the ringing typically results from two main sources: the wave propagation, and system ringing13. Different researchers recommend allowing for more than three round trips5,14 (10 round trips in the case of polymers1,8) of the stress waves through the gauge length in order to reach the dynamic equilibrium. For strain rates greater than 200/s, the test duration decreases to the order of 0.1 ms, which is comparable to three round-trip time and therefore bar systems (e.g. Hopkinson) are preferred over the servo-hydraulic load frames. The second source of load signal oscillation is related to the ringing phenomenon1,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21, which occurs when the impulse during load introduction leads the test system to oscillate due to inertia effects22. Employing lightweight clamps and mounting the specimen as close as possible to the force link will be effective to reduce the ringing effect15,23 for strain rates below 100/s. The most dominant factor in reducing ringing is to improve the measurement technique as discussed extensively in the literature3,9,10,11,16,17 where piezo-electric load washers (force links) were recognized as being unsuitable for strain rates beyond 100 s−1, due to their lag and oscillations3,15. The common solution, as presented here, involved attaching strain gauges on the tab section of the specimen1,3,9,10,11,16,17. A post-test evaluation of the failed specimen should confirm that the specimen failure occurred at the gauge section, with no signs of slipping observed at the grip sections. The strain rate should also be evaluated to ensure it remained constant during a dynamic test24.
Closed form solutions1,11 or finite element analyses10,25,26 have been employed by a variety of research groups to model intermediate to high strain rate tests. These studies help understand the physics of the phenomena in such tests as well as target specimen design and optimization to attain reliable results; however experimental procedure as explained herein are still the main source of material characterization data. Incorporating the material properties, obtained from such experimental investigations, into new simulations, the designer can model complicated dynamic failure scenarios, such as full-scale car crashes.
The authors have nothing to disclose.
The authors acknowledge the great assistance from Dmitrii Klishch, Michel Delannoy, Tyler Musclow, Fraser Kirby, Joshua Ilse and Alex Naftel. Financial support by the National Research Council Canada (NRC) through the Security Materials Technology (SMT) Program is also appreciated.
Camera Lens | Opto Engineering | Telecentric lens 23-64 | |
High Speed Camera | SAX Photron Fastcam | ||
High Speed DAQ | National Instruments | USB-6259 | |
High Speed Servo-Hydraulic Load Frame | MTS Systems Corporation | Custom Built | |
Jab Bullet Light with diffuser | AADyn JAB BULLET | 15° diffusers | |
Strain gauge | Micro-Measurements | Model EA-13-062AQ-350 |