Strain Rate Dependent Compressive Response of Open Cell Polyurethane Foam

Polymeric foams are used for impact protection due to their ability to absorb large amounts of strain energy. In this work, the compressive response of an open cell polyurethane foam currently used as liner in the advanced combat helmet is examined across strain rates. A traditional load frame is used to investigate the quasi-static behavior, and two different modifications of a conventional Kolsky (split-Hopkinson) bar configuration are used to probe the dynamic response. A unique, independent method not relying on strain gage signals is presented that leverages high-speed full-field imaging to track the velocity on each side of the sample-bar interface and used to extract the dynamic stress-strain response; the results are compared against traditional strain gage measurements. X-ray tomography is used to examine the global morphological characteristics of the foam. The foam is found to be strongly rate dependent, where the characteristic properties vary logarithmically with strain rate. An analytical expression is presented to describe the rate dependency that collapses all stress-strain curves on a master curve. Full-field kinematic data from digital image correlation taken during loading is used to extract a nonlinear Poisson’s ratio as a function of strain, which is found to be strain rate insensitive. A tangent Poisson function is used to explore the foam’s auxetic behavior. These findings provide insight on physically-based constitutive modeling of foams, crucial to predictive brain injury simulations, as well as motivate the need to probe local heterogenous behavior across strain rates moving forward.