Factors controlling sizes of brittle fragments due to impact loadings

This paper briefly reports our recent progresses in the analytical and numerical studies on the dynamic fragmentation of brittle materials. The research renders a universal function for estimating the fragment size from the material parameters and the external strain rate. The curve of this function is plotted against the popular energy models, which was firstly presented by Grady and later modified by Glenn and Chudnovsky, to show the differences. Comparisons with other numerical results and the experimental data show that the present model is more reasonable. Based on the theoretical analysis, we discuss further on the design and conduction of the experiments which are aimed to study the brittle fragmentation phenomenon.