AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE DYNAMIC PLASTIC BEHAVIOR OF RECTANGULAR PLATES

An experimental investigation has been undertaken in order to study the behavior of fully clamped rectangular plates when subjected to uniformly distributed impulsive velocities. The total energy of the dynamic loads was sufficiently large to cause plastic flow of the plate material and maximum permanent transverse deflections from 0.3 to nearly 10 times the corresponding plate thickness. The rectangular plates had aspect ratios (BETA) of 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and 1 and were made from either hot rolled mild steel, which is a strain-rate sensitive material, or aluminum 6061 T6, which is almost strain-rate insensitive. A rigid, perfectly plastic method, which included the influence of geometry changes, gave theoretical predictions which agreed favorably with the corresponding experimental results recorded on aluminum 6061 T6 rectangular plates.