Study on the fragmentation of shells

TL;DR

This study investigates the fragmentation behavior of thin shells under impact and internal pressure, combining experiments, stochastic models, and simulations to understand fragment shapes and size distributions, revealing power law behaviors.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed experimental and theoretical analysis of shell fragmentation, including shape and size distributions, using high-speed imaging and advanced modeling techniques.

Findings

Fragment size distribution follows a power law.

Experimental and numerical results agree on fragment shape distributions.

Identified key fragmentation mechanisms in shells.

Abstract

Fragmentation can be observed in nature and in everyday life on a wide range of length scales and for all kinds of technical applications. Most studies on dynamic failure focus on the behaviour of bulk systems in one, two and three dimensions under impact and explosive loading, showing universal power law behaviour of fragment size distribution. However, hardly any studies have been devoted to fragmentation of shells. We present a detailed experimental and theoretical study on the fragmentation of closed thin shells of various materials, due to an excess load inside the system and impact with a hard wall. Characteristic fragmentation mechanisms are identified by means of a high speed camera and fragment shapes and mass distributions are evaluated. Theoretical rationalisation is given by means of stochastic break-up models and large-scale discrete element simulations with spherical shell systems under different extreme loading situations. By this we ex-plain fragment shapes and distributions and prove a power law for the fragment mass distribution. Satisfactory agreement between experimental findings and nu-merical predictions of the exponents of the power laws for the fragment shapes is obtained.