Scaling the saturated impulse behaviour of strain-rate sensitive square plates

This paper addresses the non-scalability of the saturated impulse behaviour for strain-rate sensitive square plates under rectangular pressure pulse. A dimensional analysis based on a new set of primary dimensions of the density ρ, the static yield stress σ ₀, the thickness H and the side length L is proposed. Based on the similitude criteria of dimensional analysis and a rigid, perfectly plastic analysis method, distorted scaled models are developed, which have individual scale factors for the side length and the thickness respectively, rather than the standard one with a uniform scale factor. The rigid, perfectly plastic prediction shows that the distorted scaled models can behave the same with the prototype. To verify the technique, elastoplastic numerical simulation for the distorted scaled models is performed by finite element (FE) code ANSYS-LSDYNA. The FE results show that the distorted scaled models can predict the prototype satisfactorily.