Theory of spall damage accumulation in ductile metals

Spall damage is a type of fracture produced when large tensile stresses are developed in material bodies as a result of the interaction of stress waves. The damage develops independently at various points in the body because of the short duration of stress application, but interacts in a complicated way with the stress wave. A theory of these phenomena is presented for the case where the basic response of the material is viscoplastic, and where the damage takes the form of a distribution of small rounded voids. This theory is specialized to the case of rectilinear motion and an example problem solved numerically.