Interface Forces in Laterally Impacted Steel Tubes

In engineering mechanisms, solid bodies frequently come to a contact with a variety of geometric and kinematic situations. There has been a trend to express the interaction of the contacted bodies in the form of equivalent interface forces. The interface force represents the level of load transferred from one body to another. In a static or quasi-static contact problem, the interface forces could be sensibly evaluated by integrating the normal and the shear stresses over the common interfaces. In a dynamic contact, the interface stresses and subsequently the interface forces happen to be more complicated. They are, furthermore, affected by other parameters such as inertia forces, stress waves propagation, the material strain rate dependency and damping. This paper reports interface forces recorded in a series of experimental impact tests on axially pre-compressed steel tubes along with those from the numerical simulations of the tests. To monitor the so called impact loads, two small steel rings as load cells have been built in the striker. Based on the experimental and numerical results, the concept of equivalent interface forces in the impacted tubes has been verified. It has been highlighted that the interface forces (or the impact loads) may vary on the striker or the specimen themselves, depending on the measuring locations. Effects of axial compressions on the interface forces picked up by the striker load cells, impact loads imparted to the specimen supports and on the impact duration have been discussed. It has been reported that the initial compression applied to the tubes does not remain constant during and after the impact event. The amount of variations also depends on the initial level of the tube compression.