An Approximate Treatment of Blunt Body Impact

This paper considers a blunt body, modelled by an elastic-perfectly plastic one-dimensional bar, impacting normally against a rigid fixed target as indicated in Figure 1. When the impact velocity is small, the bar behaves elastically during the ensuing motion and rebounds with an equal and opposite velocity to that on impact. But for large impact velocity, part of the bar adjacent to the point of contact experiences permanent plastic deformation reducing the rebound velocity. The illuminating theory developed by Taylor analyzed the impact of a rigid-plastic bar. We extend this treatment by employing a semi-inverse procedure combined with energy conservation to additionally take into account elastic deformation.