ABSTRACT
The demands of light material have increased continuously for the past few years. A huge number of funds and works have been invested to create lighter material without sacrificing its initial performances. To date, polymer is one of the promising materials that completely satisfied the lenient requirements with added excellent balance between impact resistance and weight. For these reasons, polymers have received remarkable attention from both industrial and educational sectors. Although polymers exhibit a lot of excellent abilities, their mechanical characteristics have become the primary criteria that determine the overall performances [1,2]. Recently, many sophisticated techniques exist to characterize the mechanical properties of polymers. Nevertheless, the techniques are totally different between static and dynamic assessments. As pointed out by Omar et al. [3], the universal testing machine used in static properties measurement would not be relevant for dynamic measurement because of the difficulties in providing high strain rate condition to the specimen. Therefore, a unique dynamic facility was first introduced by Kolsky [4] in 1949 to fulfill and satisfy the high strain rate testing requirements, which is known as the split Hopkinson pressure bar (SHPB) apparatus. Annually, the apparatus has experienced magnificent evolution by the following researchers [5–7], where currently, it has become a standard method of measuring material dynamic mechanical properties in the range of 10 s 2 to 10 s 4 of strain rates [8,9]. In polymer, factors such as chain structures, type of branching, and molecular weight might be key drivers that affect their mechanical characteristics [10–12]. Apart from internal issues, it is believed that external factor such as strain rate effect may also cause huge impacts to the mechanical behavior of polymers.
