Incipient and progressive damage in polyethylene under extreme tensile conditions

The Dynamic-Tensile-Extrusion (Dyn-Ten-Ext) test was developed at LANL by Gray and coworkers to probe the tensile response of materials at large strains (>1) and high strain-rates (>1,000/s) by firing projectiles through a conical die at 300-700 m/s. This technique has recently been applied to various polymers, such as the fluoropolymers PTFE (Teflon) and the chemically similar PCTFE, which respectively exhibited catastrophic fragmentation and distributed dynamic necking. This work details investigations of the Dyn-Ten-Ext response of high density polyethylene, both to failure and sub-critical conditions. At large extrusion ratios (∼7.4) and high velocities, such as those previously employed, HDPE catastrophically fragmented in a craze-like manner in the extruded jet. At more modest extrusion ratios and high velocities the specimen extruded a stable jet that ruptured cleanly, and at lower velocities was recovered intact after sustaining substantial internal damage. Thermomechanical finite element simulations showed that the damage corresponded to a locus of shear stress in the presence of hydrostatic tension. X-ray computed tomography corroborated the prediction of a shear damage mechanism by finding the region of partially damaged material to consist of macroscopic shear-mode cracks nearly aligned with the extrusion axis, originating from the location of damage inception.