Impacting brittle materials using a designed fast indentation device

Material failure is determined by a suite of deformation mechanisms with differing kinetics operating together and presented an integrated response to an observer. To elucidate processes requires separating one from another in order to construct physically-based descriptions of behaviour. Observing a material where failure processes are controlled by a designed impulse and are at a suitable scale offers the possibility of separating operating mechanisms. A highly reproducible synchronised loading test frame has been developed by
Diamond and Manchester. It has already been fielded at the ESRF and shown useful results using ultra-high speed single bunch image mode on simple test problems. Now that the device has been proven, we show studies on the compression and fracture of glass and quartz.