PSI - Issue 28

Haibao Liu et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 28 (2020) 106–115 Liu H et al./ Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2020) 000–000

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employed to strike the composite specimens at 15 J to investigate the effect of impactor geometry. The mass of the impactors was approximately 5.2 kg. For each type of impact, three composite specimens were tested to ensure the consistency of the experimental results, which was excellent. During the impact experiments, the composite specimen was placed on a steel platform with a 125 mm × 75 mm cut-out window and clamped using four toggle clamps with rubber tips, which prevented any slippage of the composite specimen during the impact test (ASTM 2014).

Fig. 3. Set-up for the drop-weight experiments (left) and the fixed composite specimen (right).

After the drop-weight impact experiments, all the specimens were inspected using a C-scan device, see Fig. 4, to assess the impact-induced damage. The C-scan device has a 5 MHz probe with a scanning width of 34 mm. During the inspection, the probe can be slid across the surface of the target specimen and an encoder was used to record the displacement of the probe (Liu et al. 2020a).

Fig. 4. C-scan device for impact damage assessment.