Shock Waves Impacting Composite Material Plates: The Mutual Interaction

High-performance, fiber-reinforced polymer composites have been extensively used in structural applications in the last 30 years because of their light weight combined with high specific stiffness and strength at a rather low cost. The automotive industry has adopted these materials in new designs of lightweight vehicles. The mechanical response and characterization of such materials under transient dynamic loading caused with shock impact induced by blast is not well understood. Air blast is associated with a fast traveling shock front with high pressure across followed by a decrease in pressure behind due to expansion waves. The time scales associated with the shock front are typically 10(3) faster than those involved in the expansion waves. Impingement of blast waves on structures can cause a reflection of the wave off the surface of the structure followed by a substantial transient aerodynamic load, which can cause significant deformation and damage of the structure. These can alter the overpressure, which is built behind the reflected shock. In addition, a complex aeroelastic interaction between the blast wave and the structure develops that can induce reverberation within an enclosure, which can cause substantial overpressure through multiple reflections of the wave. Numerical simulations of such interactions are quite challenging. They usually require coupled solvers for the flow and the structure. The present contribution provides a physics-based analysis of the phenomena involved, a critical review of existing computational techniques together with some recent results involving face-on impact of shock waves on thin composite plates.