A New Technique to Measure the Dynamic Fracture Toughness of Solids

We propose and assess a new experimental technique to measure the fracture toughness of engineering materials and its sensitivity to strain rate. The proposed method is based on a ring expansion technique and it overcomes the limitations of current dynamic fracture tests, as it is not affected by transient stress wave propagation during loading and it results in spatially uniform remote stress and strain fields prior to fracture; the method is also suitable to achieve remote strain rates well in excess of 1000 s-1. We demonstrate the technique by measuring the plane-stress Mode I fracture toughness of PMMA specimens at remote strain rates ranging from 10-3 s-1 to 102 s-1. The experiments show an increase of the toughness of the material with increasing strain rate.