Soft recovery experiments

The structure/property relationships in materials subjected to shock-wave deformation is physically very difficult to conduct and complex to interpret due to the dynamic nature of the shock process and the very short time of the test. Due to these imposed constraints, most real-time shock-process measurements are limited to studying the interactions of the transmitted waves arrival at the free surface. To augment these in situ wave-profile measurements, shock-recovery techniques were developed in the late 1950s to assess experimentally the residual effects of shock-wave compression on materials. The object of soft-recovery experiments is to examine the terminal structure/property relationships of a material that has been subjected to a known uniaxial shock history, then returned to an ambient pressure... 

To answer questions regarding dislocation multiplication in Mg-doped LiF single crystals, Vorthman and Duvall [19] describe soft-recovery experiments on <100)-oriented crystals shock loaded above the critical shear stress necessary for rapid precursor decay. Postshock analysis of the samples indicate that the dislocation density in recovered samples is not significantly greater than the preshock value. The predicted dislocation density (using precursor-decay analysis) is not observed. It is found, however, that the critical shear stress, above which the precursor amplitude decays rapidly, corresponds to the shear stress required to disturb grown-in dislocations which make up subgrain boundaries. 

To illustrate the effect of radial release interactions on the structure/ property relationships in shock-loaded materials, experiments were conducted on copper shock loaded using several shock-recovery designs that yielded differences in es but all having been subjected to a 10 GPa, 1 fis pulse duration, shock process [13]. Compression specimens were sectioned from these soft recovery samples to measure the reload yield behavior, and examined in the transmission electron microscope (TEM) to study the substructure evolution. The substructure and yield strength of the bulk shock-loaded copper samples were found to depend on the amount of e, in the shock-recovered sample at a constant peak pressure and pulse duration. In Fig. 6.8 the quasi-static reload yield strength of the 10 GPa shock-loaded copper is observed to increase with increasing residual sample strain. 

Shock-recovery experiments by Gray [10] were conducted to assess directly if the strain-path reversal inherent to the shock contains a traditional microstructurally controlled Bauschinger effect for a shock-loaded two-phase material. Two samples of a polycrystalline Al-4 wt.% Cu alloy were shock loaded to 5.0 GPa and soft recovered in the same shock assembly to assure identical shock-loading conditions. The samples had two microstructural... 

G. F. Raiser, R. J. Clifton, and M. Ortiz, A Soft-Recovery Plate Impact Experiment for Studying Microcracking in Ceramics, Mechanics of Materials, 10, 1-43 (1990). 

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