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Failure characteristics of strength-equivalent aluminium and steel plates in

impact conditions

Conference Paper · March 2013

DOI: 10.1201/b15120-25

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 Analysis and Design of Marine Structures – Guedes Soares & Romanoff (eds)
© 2013 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-1-138-00045-2

Failure characteristics of strength-equivalent aluminium and steel plates

in impact conditions

B. Liu, R. Villavicencio & C. Guedes Soares

Centre for Marine Technology and Engineering (CENTEC), Instituto Superior Técnico,
Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

ABSTRACT: Experimental drop weight impact tests have been performed to examine the failure
characteristics of small-scale clamped rectangular plates stuck laterally by a mass with a spherical indenter.
The experiments are conducted on aluminium and steel plates of the same bending stiffness. Thus, the
impact tests describe the behaviour of strength-equivalent ship building materials subjected to rapidly
varying loads. The experimental results are presented in terms of the force-displacement responses and
the failure modes of the specimen plates, which are very sensitive to the diameter of the indenters. Also,
the experimental results show that the critical deflection is similar for both the aluminium and steel plates
while some differences are observed in the critical force and energy. In addition, the magnitudes of the
critical deflection, force and energy are compared a static theoretical prediction to allow the selection of
equivalent impact strength plates.

1 INTRODUCTION Table 1. Comparison of aluminium and steel plates.

The aluminium can replace the steel in the
construction of the hull structures in order to
reduce the total weight of the ship, particularly for
high-speed ships. Design criteria can convert the
steel to the strength-equivalent aluminium struc-
ture by the same deflection and stiffness (Lamb
and Beavers 2010; Kasten 2010). Nevertheless,
ships suffer rapidly varying loads, such as slam-
ming, ice-impact and collision and grounding. In
the bottom and bow flare slamming, the shell plat-
ing and its supporting structure are subjected to
high impact pressure forces, which accelerate and
deflect all of this structure and set up vibrations,
particularly in the plating. During ship collisions
and groundings, the ship structure should be capa-
ble to absorb the impact energy without undergo-
ing certain types of failure.
Since the aluminium and the steel behave as
brittle and ductile material, respectively, their
impact strength should be compared to guarantee
the safety of the design. Some advantages and dis-
advantages of aluminium and steel plates with the
same stiffness are listed in Table 1. The coefficients
used to replace the steel plates by aluminium are
also indicated in Table 1. Usually, the steel expe-
riences larger yield stress, ultimate tensile stress
and fracture strain. Also, the material strain rate
sensitivity is more evident for the steel, improving
its structural crashworthiness. The thickness of the
replaced aluminium structure should be larger to
Aluminium: Lightweight; expensive; no corrosion; low
yield stress; low ultimate tensile stress; low fracture
strain; may melt in fire.
Steel: Heavy; cheap; corrosion; simple to fabricate.
Thickness (t) tal = 1.42 tst
Young’s modulus (E) Eal = 0.35 Est
Bending stiffness (Et3) Eal tal3 = Est tst3
Deflection (w) wal = wst
Density (ρ) ρal = 0.34 ρst
Weight (m) mal = 0.48 mst
*Subscript al and st represents aluminium and steel,
respectively.
achieve the same steel stiffness due to the smaller
Young’s modulus.
Experimental tests of laterally loaded rectan-
gular plates have been conducted to derive ana-
lytical expressions of the plastic response and
failure of aluminium and steel plates. For exam-
ple, Jones (1971) proposed an energy approach,
based on the rigid-plastic theory, to estimate the
permanent deflection of rectangular plates under
uniformly distributed loads. Zhu et al. (1994)
used the energy approach of Jones to study the
dynamic behaviour of plates subjected to low
velocity impacts.
The initiation of rupture is an important
aspect in the analysis of laterally impacted plates.

167
Therefore, Shen et al. (2002a, b) proposed a is used to determine the engineering stress-strain
theoretical method to predict the onset of failure behaviour of the material. The mechanical proper-
for thin circular plates stuck by a conical indenter, ties of the aluminium and steel materials are sum-
and Simonsen and Lauridsen (2000) and Lee et al. marized Table 2 and the engineering stress-strain
(2004) developed analytical formulae to estimate curves are shown in Figure 2. The steel has bet-
the deformation and failure of thin clamped plates ter elastic properties since the yield stress is larger
punched by a spherical indenter. Moreover, it has than that of the aluminium (∼82%). Also, the steel
been demonstrated that the plastic deformation withstands larger stresses before necking because
until failure is strongly dependent on the shape of of its larger ultimate tensile strength (∼42%). The
the indenter as summarised by Jones et al. (2008, aluminium fractures at the maximum load while
2012) when proposed a theoretical method to pre- the steel necks decreasing the level of stresses until
dict the dimensionless perforation energy for plates fracture occurs.
struck by indenter with different shapes. The plates are fully clamped by four M8 bolts
The present paper investigates the plastic between two thick rectangular steel plates with an
response and failure characteristics of strength- internal cut-out of 127 × 76.2 mm (Fig. 3). The
equivalent aluminium and steel plates. This is bolts compress the specimen and restrict its lon-
done through drop weight impact tests. Different gitudinal displacement between the supports. The
diameters of hemi-spherically ended indenters are support plates are fixed to a strong structural base
used in order to study their influence on the impact to prevent any movement.
response of the specimens. The impact tests pro- The impact tests are performed using a fully
vide the actual force-displacement response and instrumented Rosand IFW5 falling weight machine
failure mode of the plate specimens.
The magnitudes of the critical deflection, force
and energy are compared with the theoretical pre-
dictions proposed by Simonsen and Lauridsen
(2000). The actual experiments and the theoreti-
cal predictions allow the definition of equivalent
impact strength aluminium plates that can absorb
similar incident energy than that of steel plates.
In addition, the specific energy absorption is used
to evaluate the weight effectiveness of the steel
and aluminium plates subjected to lateral impact.
The presented results are of considerable practi-
cal importance to assess the safety of aluminium
and steel structural elements subjected to dynamic
loads, since these calculations require accurate esti-
mates of the large deformations provoked by the
impact. Figure 1. Dimensions of the machined test pieces.

2 EXPERIMENTAL DETAILS
Table 2. Mechanical properties of material.
The experimental program evaluates the plastic Aluminium Steel
response until failure of rectangular plates stuck Property Units 2.0 mm 1.4 mm
laterally by a mass with a spherical indenter. Alu-
minium and steel plates of the same bending stiff- Density kg/m3 2650 7850
ness are selected. The plates are aluminium alloy Young’s modulus GPa 72 206
5083/H111 (2.0 mm thickness) and mild steel ST12 Poisson’s ratio - 0.33 0.3
(1.4 mm thickness). The mechanical properties are Yield stress MPa 125 228
obtained by quasi-static tensile tests carried out on Ultimate tensile MPa 257 364
material cut from the same plates from which the strength
impact specimens are taken. The dimensions of the Fracture stress MPa 257 272
machined tensile test pieces are shown in Figure 1. Fracture strain - 0.15 0.23
Three tensile tests are conducted for each mate- (100 mm)
rial at a rate of 1.0 mm/min until fracture occurs. Strength MPa 405 585
coefficient C0
The displacement-controlled tension tests are car-
Strain hardening - 0.160 0.172
ried out with a tensile test machine INSTRON exponent n
3369. It records the force-elongation curve, which

168
Figure 2. Engineering stress-strain curves of aluminium
and steel material.
Figure 3. Experimental set up.
(Fig. 4). A small, light, hemispherically ended
indenter is dropped from a known, variable height
between guide rails onto horizontally supported
specimens. A much larger mass is attached to the
indenter and a load cell between the two gives the
variation of the impact force with time. An optical
gate provides the incident velocity of the impact
head. The time histories of the displacement, the
169
Figure 4. Fully instrumented Rosand IFW5 falling
weight machine.
absorbed energy and the velocity are calculated
from the measured force-time data by successive
numerical integrations. Four hemispherically ended
strikers of diameters 30, 20, 16 and 10 mm are
evaluated. The incident kinetic energy is 250 J for
the aluminium plates and 400 J for the steel plates.
The impact response of the aluminium and steel
plate is compared at the critical incident energy,
i.e. when failure occurs. Therefore, the incident
energy could be overestimated for some specimens.
However, the tendencies of the force-displacement
curves are not affected with this overestimation.
The last statement is valid as far as the material
strain rate sensitivity is negligible.
3 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
In all cases, the specimens suffer large plastic defor-
mation and fail at the impact point. The magni-
tudes of the critical forces, deflections and absorbed
energies at failure are summarized in Table 3. These
magnitudes are measured at the peak force, which
occurs at the initial rupture of the plates. The
critical energy is smaller than the incident kinetic
energy. The diameter of the indenter strongly
influences the experimental results, particularly the
specimens impacted with larger indenters absorb
Table 3. Summary of experimental results.

Values at failure
Input
energy Force Defln Energy
Specimen* (J) (kN) (mm) (J)

AL-D30 250 23.8 18.7 199.2

AL-D20 250 17.9 18.1 149.5
AL-D16 250 15.4 16.9 125.4
AL-D10 250 9.7 13.1 61.9
ST-D30 400 27.5 18.7 257.1
ST-D20 400 21.8 17.8 209.6
ST-D16 400 18.9 16.0 149.4
ST-D10 400 11.8 12.9 76.9 Figure 5. Shape of the deformation. (a): AL-D30;
(b): ST-D30; (c): AL-D20; (d): ST-D20; (e): AL-D16;
*Specimen Notation. AL and ST: aluminium and steel, (f): ST-D16.
respectively; D30, D20, D16 and D10: diameter of
indenter 30, 20, 16 and 10 mm, respectively.

more energy and, consequently, larger forces and

deflections develop. The aluminium plates absorb
less energy than the steel plates (22%). Also, the
critical force of the aluminium plates is about 17%
smaller than for the steel plates. However, both alu-
minium and steel plates suffer similar deflection at
failure (2.2%).
Since the strength-equivalent aluminium plates
present unfavourable energy absorbing capabili-
ties, it is not appropriate to replace steel plates in
the design of structures subjected to lateral impact.
Therefore, the thickness of the aluminium plates
should increase to improve the impact strength
characteristics. This is possible since the weight of
the aluminium is smaller than the one of the steel
(Table 1).
The shape of the deformation of the aluminium Figure 6. Deformation profile of the rectangular
and steel plates is shown in Figure 5. The plates plates.
struck by the indenter with diameter 10 mm are not
included in Figure 5, since the final perforation is
affected by the geometry of this striker. Large plas- configuration. This stretching rises into an axial
tic deformation develops in the specimens in order membrane strain and associated membrane force.
to absorb the external dynamic energy. The defor- Thus, the plate deforms plastically due to the mem-
mation of the specimens is divided into two parts, brane forces at the necking circle. When the speci-
global deflection and local indentation (Shen et al. mens suffer considerable plastic strain, the crack
2002a; Liu et al. 2012), as indicated in Figure 6. is initiated at the necking circle in the direction of
The local indentation has the shape of the striker the short span (Fig. 6) since the membrane force
head. The large external dynamic energy produces is much larger in this direction. In this paper the
structural in-plane tearing failure due to the exces- characteristic failure mode is named ‘tensile fail-
sive in-plane tensile strain (Shen et al. 2002a). The ure’ since the necking circle experiences tensile
spherical indenter penetrates the plate with ductile stretching, after severe indentation, and thinning
enlargement to elongate the material in a plastic in the thickness direction. Finally, the fracture is
flow field below the indenter, forming a circular propagated through the necking circle while the
edge named necking circle, as shown in Figure 6. indenter pushes the plate.
In general, the diameter of the necking circle is The failure mode of the specimen plates is similar
smaller than the one of the striker. As the supports to the mode observed in plate quasi-static punch-
of the laterally impacted plate are restrained axially, ing tests (Lee et al. 2004, Ehlers 2010, Atkins et al.
the centre line of the plate is longer in the deformed 1998) and dynamic impact tests (Shen et al. 2002a).

170
Figure 7. Force-displacement responses. Different diameters of indenters. (a): aluminium plate; (b): steel plate.
It must be mentioned that the energy absorbing
mechanisms are similar between dynamic and
static tests of ship structures with the same struc-
tural arrangement. However, the energy absorbed
in dynamic tests could be larger than that absorbed
in the corresponding static tests, a circumstance
attributed to the phenomenon of material strain-
rate sensitivity (Jones and Wierzbicki 1983).
The aluminium and steel plates show similar
global deflection and local indentation since they
suffer close deflection at failure. The equivalent
strain distribution near the impact point can influ-
ence the deformation mode of the specimens. In
particular, this strain distribution is strongly influ-
enced by the coefficient of friction between the
interfaces of the indenter and the specimen (Lee
et al. 2004). If this coefficient is zero the plate rup-
ture at the centre, while if this coefficient grows
the diameter of the necking circle may increase,
as numerical simulations demonstrated. Since
the static friction between aluminium-steel and
steel-steel are similar (Villavicencio et al. 2012,
Liu et al. 2012, Lee et al. 2004), the necking circle
for both types of specimens follow the same pat-
tern at the local indentation. In the actual experi-
ments, the final shape of the deformation of the
aluminium plates, compared with the steel plates,
exhibits some small cracks which initiate in the
necking circle and extend towards the indentation.
This occurs because the aluminium has less plastic
deformation capabilities as observed in the engi-
neering stress-strain curve (Fig. 2).
The impact behaviour of the specimens
during the impact event is better described by
the recorded force-displacement data (Fig. 7).
The critical absorbed energy is the integration
of the force-displacement curve until the peak force.
The diameter of the indenter strongly influences the
impact response of the plates since it changes the
dimension of the local indentation.
The slope of the force-displacement curves
decreases for specimens impacted with smaller
diameter of indenter. This slope is the instantane-
ous stiffness of the specimen, indicating its ability
171
to resist the impact load. It is also a measure of the
resistance of the specimen to plastic deformation
until failure. The reduction of the slope is due to
more localised contact surface between the striker
and the specimen. This smaller contact effect mini-
mizes the instantaneous reaction force for a partic-
ular deflection. Furthermore, the absorbed energy
decreases because the specimens impacted by
smaller indenters experience smaller local indenta-
tion and, consequently, form a smaller necking cir-
cle. This provokes easier rupture of the specimens.
It should be mentioned that the slope of the steel
plates is larger than the one of the aluminium plates
since the steel plates have larger impact resistance
before failure.
4 ANALYTICAL APPROXIMATION
Analytical approaches have been proposed to pre-
dict the deformation and failure of plates under a
quasi-static spherical punch loading. In the present
paper, the theoretical approach of Simonsen and
Lauridsen (2000) is selected to analyse the failure
characteristics of the current aluminium and steel
plates. The comparison with quasi-static formulae
is valid since the incident impact velocity at failure
is relatively low.
Simonsen and Lauridsen (2000) investigated the
onset of failure for static lateral punch indentation
of a rigid sphere into a thin clamped circular plate.
The analytical approach predicts the plate failure
and the energy absorption up to this point. It was
demonstrated that the response of the thin plates
depends on the strength coefficient C0 and the
strain hardening exponent n of the material.
The strength coefficient and the strain harden-
ing exponent define the true stress (σt) and true
strain (εt) material curve based on the simple power
law relation. This curve gives an approximate true
indication of the deformation characteristics of a
metal (Dieter 1986):
σt C εt n (1)
 The parameters of the power law relation are
determined from the engineering stress-strain
curve. The exponent n is the linear slope of a log-
log plot of the logarithmic true stress and true
strain up to the maximum load expressed in terms
of the engineering stress and engineering strain.
The coefficient C0 is the true stress at εt = 1.0.
The tensile tests of aluminium plates show that
the stress at maximum load is almost coincident
with the fracture stress and that very little necking
occurred in the width direction. However, necking
is observed in the thickness direction. For that rea-
son, the true material relation for the aluminium
plates is also defined beyond the maximum load
(Børvik et al. 2009; Beese et al. 2010). Here, the
parameters C0 and n are obtained using the set of
equations proposed by Zhang et al. (2004). The
coefficients of the power law relation for both
aluminium and steel materials are summarised in
Table 2.
Simonsen and Lauridsen (2000) estimated the
normalized penetration until failure for circular
plates by:
δf
= 1.41n0.33ξ00.52 (2)
R0
where δf is the critical punch penetration to failure,
R0 is the radius of the clamped plate, n is the strain
hardening exponent and ξ0 = Rb/R0 is the dimen-
sionless radius of the applied punch where Rb is
the radius of the spherical punch. This equation is
valid as far as 0.1 < ξ0 < 0.5 and 0.1 < n < 0.3. The
deflection of these thin plates is independent of the
plate thickness and the yield stress since the bend-
ing resistance can be neglected. Thus, the plate
response is governed by the membrane force. This
phenomenon is manifested in tensile test results of
specimens manufactured with the same material
but different thickness since they should result in
the same engineering elongation. Also, materials
with different yield stress but similar strain hard-
ening exponent could result in similar elongation
until fracture. This is due to the fact that the strain
hardening exponent determines the elongation at
fracture of the material.
The penetration until failure for circular plates
is similar to the penetration for square plates where
the initial half-width corresponds to the initial
radius R0 (Lee et al. 2004). Therefore, the theo-
retical model of Simonsen and Lauridsen (2000) is
used to evaluate the parameters that influence the
deformation process of the actual plates.
Equation (2) shows that the strain hardening
exponent determines the deflection at failure of
geometrically similar specimens manufactured
with different materials. In the actual aluminium
172
and steel material the hardening exponent is very
similar, 0.160 and 0.172, respectively. Therefore,
Equation (2) estimates similar deflections for the
aluminium and steel plates when impacted by the
same type of indenter (difference 2.4%). This is
demonstrated in the experimental results (Table 3).
In Equation (2), the relationship between the
deflection and the diameter of indenter is δf ∼ Rb0.52.
This implies that the deflection at failure decrease
accelerated with the diameter of indenter, as also
observed in the current impact tests.
The theoretical approach of Simonsen and Lau-
ridsen (2000) was followed by Lee et al. (2004) to
evaluate the influence of the material ductility. Lee
et al. (2004) demonstrated that the strain harden-
ing exponent can be replaced by the critical dam-
age value for ductile fracture:
δf
= 2 Dc ξ00.38 (3)
R0
where Dc is the critical damage value for ductile
fracture. This equation is valid for 0.1 < ξ0 < 0.75.
The critical damage value is a function of the criti-
cal failure strain obtained from the tensile test sim-
ulations. Since the accuracy of these simulations is
relatively low beyond localisation, the failure strain
is only approximated, and thus this new approach
is less accurate. In addition, Equation (3) is not
appropriate to estimate the deflection of the plate
for larger failure strains, because the deflection at
failure is determined by the failure at the necking
circle (Fig. 6). For example, the deflection at fail-
ure is similar for a range of plastic strains between
0.7 and 1.2, which are obtained from numerical
simulation of tensile and impact tests (Liu et al.
2012). However, Equation (3) is very sensitive to
the critical damage coefficient, thus it is appropri-
ate for low failure strains, as the ones obtained in
the actual aluminium plates.
The reaction force until failure for the circular
plates of Simonsen and Lauridsen (2000) can be
expressed as:
2π C0t0 Rb [ − l ψ c ]n cos
cosψ c i 2 ψ c (4)
where C0 is the strength coefficient, t0 is the plate
thickness and ψc is the critical wrapping angle to
failure:
c ≈ 0.957 + 0.399 n (5)
The absorbed energy until failure is:
E π C0t0R0Rb { ξ00.607 − 0.387ξ0 + ξ02
+ 0.067( n − 0.2 )} (6)
 Equations (4) to (6) are valid within the range
0.1 < ξ0 < 0.5 and 0.1 < n < 0.3. It should be noticed
that the reaction force (Equation 4) is independ-
ent of the radius of the plates. Simonsen and Lau-
ridsen (2000) demonstrated the reaction force is
similar for plates with circular, square and rectan-
gular geometries, i.e. the influence of the specimen
geometry is negligible to estimate this force. This is
possible since the specimens suffer the local inden-
tation far away from their boundaries (Simonsen
and Lauridsen 2000). Thereby, Equation (4) is
adopted to analyse the current rectangular plates.
Equation (4) predicts similar reaction forces for
the aluminium and the steel plates; the difference is ∼
1.1%. However, the experimental results demonstrate
that the peak force for the steel plates is ∼17% larger
than that for the aluminium plates (Table 3). Since
the theoretical predictions are similar to the experi-
mental results of the aluminium plates, the differ-
ence in the experimental reaction forces is attributed
to small strain rate effects of the mild steel plates
when subjected to dynamic impact loads. It must be
mentioned that the quasi-static approach should be
similar to the dynamic experimental response of the
aluminium plates because the aluminium alloy mate-
rial is essentially strain rate insensitive (Jones 1989).
The absorbed energy until failure is the numeri-
cal integration of force-displacement relationship.
Therefore, the theoretical energy (Equation 6)
includes the parameters used to estimate both
the deflection and reaction force. As the analyti-
cal deflections and reaction forces until failure are
very similar for the aluminium and steel plates, the
theoretical critical energies predict also close mag-
nitudes. This similitude differs from the experi-
mental results as shown in Table 3. The difference
between the experimental forces is responsible for
this difference in the energy absorption.
5 DISCUSSION
The present paper investigates the impact charac-
teristics of strength-equivalent aluminium and steel
plates for application in ship structural design. For
converting a parent steel ship, that satisfies rule
requirements in terms of structural strength, to an
equivalent aluminium ship, three design param-
eters should be considered: stress, deflection and
weight. The equivalent ship manufactured in alu-
minium should have an equal or better structural
integrity than the parent steel ship.
The coefficients used to replace the steel plates
by aluminium plates (Table 1) are valid within the
elastic limit, so they use a safety factor smaller than
the yield stress. However, the design of structures
subjected to dynamic impact requires the inclusion
of the nonlinear behaviour of the material.
173
The critical energy, for a given plate geometry
(width × length) and material, is proportional
to the plate thickness (Equation 6). Thus, the
absorbing capability of this particular plate can
be improved by increasing its thickness. In the
actual experiments, the aluminium plates require
to absorb 1.3 times more energy to make equal the
energy absorbed by the steel plates. This implies
that the thickness of the aluminium plates should
be increased to 2.6 mm. It can be concluded that
the impact tests can estimate the thickness neces-
sary to absorb the same energy absorbed by the
parent plate. Therefore, the relation tal = 1.42tst
for strength-equivalent aluminium and steel plates
should increase to tal = 1.85tst in order to satisfy the
same impact strength. This linear relation is valid
for thin plates and assumes that the critical energy
varies proportional to the plate thickness. The
latter is based on quasi-static punching tests and
could be used to estimate the impact strength of
aluminium plates since the aluminium is essentially
strain rate insensitive.
The absorbed energy is often divided by the
weight of the structure to give the specific energy
absorption (Se) which is widely used to judge the
relative effectiveness of various energy absorb-
ing devices and structures (Jones and Wierzbicki
1983). The materials with high Se offer the potential
for significant weight reduction in energy absorb-
ing components, usually used in the design of cars,
airplanes, ships, etc. In the present work, the same
principle is used to evaluate the absorbing capabil-
ity of the steel and aluminium plates.
The aluminium has higher Se due to its smaller
density, offering potential for significant weight
reduction in energy absorbing components. More-
over, the larger thickness for the aluminium plates
(tal = 1.85tst) reduces the deflection compared with
the steel plates, improving the designed structural
yield and buckling strength.
In the actual experiments, the Se of the aluminium
is larger than the one of the steel (about 63%). Thus,
the steel plate weighs 63% more than the aluminium
plate if both have the same energy absorption until
failure. This implies that the aluminium material is
advantageous respect to the weight effectiveness to
resist lateral impact. The Se estimates the reduced
weight with the same energy absorption until fail-
ure for the preliminary design. Thus, the carrying
capacity, stability and cruising speed based on the
steel parent ship can be evaluated.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The failure of the laterally impacted aluminium
and steel plates is analysed through drop weight
impact tests and theoretical analyses. This provides
good understanding of the impact strength of
equivalent aluminium and steel structures and help
to evaluate the ship structural design using alumin-
ium plates.
The strength-equivalent aluminium and steel
plates experience similar deflections until failure
although the forces and the energy are larger in the
steel plates. In order to obtain the same equivalent
impact strength of the steel plates, the thickness
of the aluminium plates can be increased since
the aluminium presents higher specific energy
absorption.
The experimental deformation process until
failure is well described by the theoretical method
presented in this paper. The local indentation plays
an important role in the total deformation of the
plates. The rupture is initiated at one point of the
necking circle due to the development of mem-
brane force, so the failure is named tensile failure.
The analysis of the impact tests with the analyti-
cal approximations describes the parameters that
influence the critical deflection, force and energy
of laterally impacted metal plates. It is shown that
the absorbed energy until failure is improved by
increasing both material power law coefficients
and not simply the yield stress, as in the compari-
son of the strength-equivalent plates.
In this study, the experimental results in terms
of the force-displacement responses and the failure
modes provide relevant information to compare
the impact strength of aluminium and steel plates.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work of the first author has been financed by a
PhD scholarship from ABS, the American Bureau
of Shipping. The authors are grateful to Dr George
Wang for his initiative to promote this scholarship.
The second author has been financed by the
Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technol-
ogy, under contract SFRH/BD/46369/2008.
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