Experimental and numerical investigations on erosion damage in glass by impact of small-sized particles

The present paper deals with damage mechanisms in soda-lime glass subjected to particle impacts. Sandblasting experiments on glass using small-sized particles were performed and resulting damaged sites were analyzed by means of a 3D optical profilometer. A particular attention is paid to determine the different morphologies of imprints and cracks with regard to particle size and impact velocity. The impacted sites show that damage patterns fairly coincide with those caused by static indentation; localized deformation and cracks nucleation are generated close to the impact zone. According to our previous work concerning the damage due to static indentation in glass (Ismail et al., Computational Materials Science 42 (2008) 407–415 [18]), the current paper takes advantage of the continuum damage mechanics (CDM) approach to simulate, via finite element analysis, the erosion behavior of soda-lime glass impacted with small-sized particles. Experimental data obtained by means of split Hopkinson pressure bar and drop ball tests are used to identify the parameters of the anisotropic stress-based damage evolution law. It is shown that the implemented anisotropic stress-based CDM model is able to predict the impact damage patterns experimentally observed. It is further shown that the removed volume in one impact site measured by 3D profilometry is well captured by the anisotropic CDM model coupled with a vanishing element technique. The dependence of material removal on the particle size and velocity is numerically studied and the trends are identified. The crater sizes predicted by the damage model are then compared with empirical models proposed in the literature to describe the velocity dependency of erosion.

► Combined experimental/numerical approach to study the particle erosion damage mechanisms in glass.
► Morphologies of imprints and cracks in glass highly depend on particle size and impact velocity.
► The stress-based continuum damage mechanics approach provides a useful tool to simulate the erosion process in glass.
► A nearly quadratic dependence between velocity and crater size was predicted.