Inertial effects of quartz force transducers embedded in a split Hopkinson pressure bar

An aluminum split Hopkinson pressure bar is instrumented with quartz force transducers and used to test low impedance materials. Two transducers are used, one at the interface between the specimen and the incident bar and the other at the interface between the specimen and the transmitter bar. It is shown that the stress measured by the incident bar gage often contains a substantial acceleration component, i.e., a significant portion of the signal recorded by the gage is due to its own inertia and not representative of the stress within the sample. Attempts are made to actively compensate for this with measurements of the acceleration of the gage. This is done in three ways: (i) by differentiation of the interface velocity, as determined by a standard strain gage analysis; (ii) by a more direct determination of acceleration, using a measurement of the strain gradient within the bar; (iii) by adding a compensation crystal and mass to the gage to remove the inertial component from the output. It is shown that all three techniques successfully mitigate inertial effects.