MPRL Facilities
Split Hopkinson Bar Intermediate Strain Rate Facility
This facility provides material testing capabilities in compression, tension, torsion, torsion/compression and torsion/tension at strain rates of the order of 102 to 104 s-1. These bars have diameters of 0.5", 0.75", and 1". Experiments with load pulses of up to 600 µs can be conducted. Soft recovery of specimens is possible, allowing postmortem microscopic analyses of specimens after well-defined load pulses. This facility is equipped with four Polytec OFV-3001 laser vibrometers each with an OFV-512 optical fiber laser head for measurement of surface velocities between 0 to 10 ms-1. Experiments concerning constitutive behavior, shear banding, dynamic fracture toughness, impact damage and response of composites, and electro-mechanical response of piezoceramics can be conducted using this facility. A set of Tektronix high-speed digital oscilloscopes are available for data acquisition at sampling rates up to 50 nanoseconds per point. An IMACON high-speed digital camera (16 frames at 200x106 f/s) is also available for high-resolution digital image acquisition.