The Hopkinson Pressure Bar (HPB) is used as a load-time or displacement-time transducer in impact or blast experiments. The Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar (SHPB) is the accepted form of material testing for strain rates between 102 S-I and 104 S-I. Explicit Finite Element Analysis (FEA) codes are increasingly used to model HPB experiments numerically, due to the complicated boundary conditions imposed by tensile and shear SHPB experiments. However, most publications on numerical modelling of HPB experiments have focussed on the response of the specimen and have paid very little attention to the modelling of the stress wave propagation in the cylindrical bars. This dissertation focuses on the numerical modelling of stress wave propagation in HPBs.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-78).