Authors: Z Hu H Luo S G Bardenhagen C R Siviour R W Armstrong H Lu
Publish Date: 2014/02/06
Volume: 55, Issue: 1, Pages: 289-300
Abstract
A polymer bonded sugar PBS cylindrical specimen in which caster sugar grains are embedded in hydroxylterminated polybutadiene HTPB binder matrix was compressed up to −315 of compressive strain without confinement while its internal microstructures were determined by Xray microcomputed tomography The reconstructed volumetric images were analyzed to determine threedimensional 3D morphologies and to investigate the damage and failure mechanisms The image grayscale was filtered by threshold values to identify individual material constituents and determine grain volume fraction An incremental digital volume correlation DVC technique was developed to determine the internal deformations and to track the movement of individual sugar grains The evolution of the internal 3D deformation of PBS is correlated to its microstructures as well as debonding and void formation The side length of a cubic representative volume element RVE for the PBS is determined as 10 times of the average grain size based on the analysis of sugar volume fraction it is consistent with the RVE size determined from convergence analysis of the average and the standard deviation of strain distribution Image analysis indicates that void ratio can be used as an indicator to quantify the extent of damage Debonding occurs at first in the inner core region and then propagates to the outer annular region Debonding is also determined as the primary mechanism for damage formation and evolution Grain fracture was not observed during the uniaxial compression of this PBS specimen under a nominal strain of −315 without confinementWe acknowledge the support of DOE NEUP program under 09–818 and ONR MURI BAA 10–026 We also thank NSF DMR0907291 CMMI1031829 CMMI1132174 ECCS1307997 for additional support We are grateful to the support of NSF CMMI0960197 for acquisition of the μCT and NSF AR20963509 for renovation of a facility that housed the μCT apparatus used in this work We thank QinetiQ and UK MoD in particular P Church and B Garaty of QinetiQ for supplying the material used in this research Lu acknowledges the Louis A Beecherl Jr Chair for additional support
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