Quantitative Assessment of the Interior Deformation of an Additively Manufactured Energetic Material Simulant under Shock Loading

The performance of energetic materials subjected to dynamic loading depends on the morphology of their microstructures. The geometric flexibility and versatility offered by additive manufacturing open new pathways to control the performance of these materials and functionally tailor them for given applications. Additively manufactured energetic materials (AMEM) have a wide range of microstructures with a hierarchy of length scales and heterogeneities which are difficult to control or avoid. To understand how they affect the response of such materials under shock loading, X-ray phase contrast imaging (XPCI) is used to probe the interior and quantify the deformation fields in the impacted samples. Two to four XPCI images were captured revealing the shock front and deformation. DIC analysis was then used to provide the first-ever assessment of the average strain fields inside the material under shock loading. The results show that the average axial strain in the samples depends on the intensity of shock loading and reaches as high as ~0.23 for impact velocities up to 1.5 m/k. The experiments presented were performed at the DCS in the APS at Argonne National Lab, in collaboration with Brian Jensen at Los Alamos National Laboratory.