Polymer plates subjected to impact: Experimental tests and numerical simulations

This paper presents quasi-static and dynamic tests on circular clamped plates made of a PEHD thermoplastic. A brief review of the main results from a material test programme, involving tension and compression tests at different rates, is also provided. The results from the material tests are used to identify the coefficients of a recently proposed hyperelastic-viscoplastic constitutive model for thermoplastics, also outlined here. Finally, the model is employed in numerical simulations of the impact tests. It is shown that the model represents the force-displacement response of the experimental tests fairly well. Also, considering the quasi-static tests, a localized failure mechanism around the impactor is captured