NPL to Research the Performance of Plastic Materials under Impact Loadings - News Item

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has begun a second phase of DTI-funded research looking at predicting the performance of plastic materials under impact loading.

The three-year programme will be undertaken at NPL laboratories in Teddington, UK, and will build on previously successful work in plastics impact prediction. The project aims to:

Evaluate materials that describe the inherent non-linear and rate-dependent properties of different polymers

Develop and standardise test methods for the measurement and analysis of data required by the models

Establish new methods to determine the failure properties of tough plastics.

Test methods and new specimen geometries will also be developed to characterise the failure behaviour of these materials, so that limits in the deformation and energy absorption of a component can be predicted in the design process.

NPL Project Leader Greg Dean said that the principal aim of the research is to show how finite element analysis (FEA) can be successfully used to predict the behaviour of plastics under impact loading. The results of this project will be immediately applicable to designers using FEA packages such as Abacus and Oasis.

Posted November 2003