Impact Compaction of a Granular Material

The dynamic behavior of granular materials has importance to a variety of engineering applications. Structural seismic coupling, planetary science, and earth penetration mechanics, are just a few of the application areas. Although the mechanical behavior of granular materials of various types have been studied extensively for several decades, the dynamic behavior of such materials remains poorly understood. High-quality experimental data are needed to improve our general understanding of granular material compaction physics. This paper will describe how an instrumented plunger impact system can be used to measure pressure-density relationships for model materials at high and controlled strain rates and subsequently used for computational modeling.