Experimental analysis of lateral impact on planar brittle material

TL;DR

This study investigates how alumina and glass plates break under lateral impact, analyzing fragment size and shape to improve understanding of brittle material fragmentation beyond traditional size distribution analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze geometrical properties of fragments and compares experimental results with a schematic fragmentation model.

Findings

Both materials show similar size distribution functions.

Geometrical properties of fragments differ significantly between materials.

Fragment shape analysis provides a more rigorous test for theoretical models.

Abstract

The fragmentation of alumina and glass plates due to lateral impact is studied. A few hundred plates have been fragmented at different impact velocities and the produced fragments are analyzed. The method employed in this work allows one to investigate some geometrical properties of the fragments, besides the traditional size distribution usually studied in former experiments. We found that, although both materials exhibit qualitative similar fragment size distribution function, their geometrical properties appear to be quite different. A schematic model for two-dimensional fragmentation is also presented and its predictions are compared to our experimental results. The comparison suggests that the analysis of the fragments' geometrical properties constitutes a more stringent test of the theoretical models' assumptions than the size distribution.