Shock Compression Science

A B S T R A C T Normal plate impact experiments were conducted to study the spall behavior of AMX602 magnesium alloy fabricated via Spinning Water Atomization Process (SWAP), which was followed by cold compaction and hot extrusion. Incipient spall damage in the specimens was measured at different shock conditions using 51 mm and 105 mm diameter bore gas guns. The Hugoniot Elastic Limit (HEL) was measured to be approximately 187 ± 11 MPa. The spall strengths extracted from the free surface velocity profiles of the shocked specimens was found to increase by 8% for shock stresses ranging from 1.61 to 4.53 GPa. The experimental data also revealed some inherent scatter in the spall strength data due to microstructural heterogeneity. Post-test fractographic analysis of the shock-recovered specimens suggests that the initiation of spall was most likely associated with intermetallic Al 2 Ca-bearing precipitates forming during the hot extrusion process. The subsequent spall failure propagated via cavitation events that involved the nucleation of nano-and micrometer-sized voids with very limited plastic growth.

As theoretically hypothesized for several decades in group IV transition metals, we have discovered a dynamically stabilized body-centered cubic (bcc) intermediate state in Zr under uniaxial loading at sub-nanosecond timescales. Under ultrafast shock wave compression, rather than the transformation from a-Zr to the more disordered hex-3 equilibrium x-Zr phase, in its place we find the formation of a previously unobserved nonequilibrium bcc metastable intermediate. We probe the compression-induced phase transition pathway in zirconium using time-resolved sub-picosecond x-ray diffraction analysis at the Linac Coherent Light Source. We also present molecular dynamics simulations using a potential derived from first-principles methods which independently predict this intermediate phase under ultrafast shock conditions. In contrast with experiments on longer timescale (> 10 ns) where the phase diagram alone is an adequate predictor of the crystalline structure of a material, our recent study highlights the importance of metastability and time dependence in the kinetics of phase transformations.