Canned Wisdom: Probing a Cylindrical Shell’s Memory of Cyclic Loading

Materials under cyclic loading experience changes in their physical properties, commonly exhibiting structural fatigue, damage and eventually failure. There exists much interest in how a material ‘remembers’ the damage done to it, and few methods exist to, without irreversibly deforming the material, quantitatively describe this ‘memory’. Here, we explore the effects of cyclic loading on the stability of cylindrical shells with many small unknown defects (empty soda-cans). Using a custom-built multi-axial tester, we repeatedly load and unload our cans and generate stability landscapes by measuring the can’s response to non-destructive lateral poking at various axial loads. Here, we will show that cyclic loading changes the can’s reaction to poking, which can be visualized through the evolution of the can’s stability landscape. We will also show how the initial defect structure of our shells can inform their overall fatigue and can be understood via topological features of our shell’s stability landscape.