The dynamic response and failure of Polycarbonate plate by soft body impact

This article is mainly to experimentally and numerically investigate the dynamic response and failure of Polycarbonate (PC) plate against strike by soft body. The experimental results show that high speed soft body impact leads to a large global displacement for PC sheet, though, the obtained strain data shows deformation of PC material are still small. This evidence allows us to employ a thermo-viscoelastic constitutive model we proposed in our previous work, where the model parameters are determined based on the uniaxial tension test data of PC materials, to describe the PC plate. Then, the simulation is made in finite element (FE) software LS-DYNA and computational results get a fair agreement with experiments including displacement, strain, and the crack propagations at high velocity impact. The temperature effect on mechanical behavior of PC sheet under impact is numerically studied as well. It is found that the effect gets more significant with the increase of impact velocity, and the higher temperature of PC sheet would lead to its larger deflection but smaller maximum resistance force and principal stress. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 56:1160–1168, 2016.