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Shear bands formation in collapsing thick walled cylinders occurs in a spontaneous manner. The advantage of examining spontaneous, as opposed to forced shear localization, is that it highlights the inherent susceptibility of the material to adiabatic shear banding without prescribed geometrical constraints. The Thick-Walled Cylinder technique (TWC) provides a controllable and repeatable technique to create and study multiple adiabatic shear bands. The technique, reported in the literature uses an explosive cylinder to create the driving force, collapsing the cylindrical sample. Recently, we developed an electro-magnetic set-up using a pulsed current generator to provide the collapsing force, replacing the use of explosives. Using this platform we examined the shear band evolution at different stages of formation in 7 metallic alloys, spanning a wide range of strength and failure properties. We examined the number of shear bands and spacing between them for the different materials to try and figure out what controls these parameters. The examination of the different materials enabled us to better comprehend the mechanisms which control the spatial distribution of multiple shear bands in this geometry. The results of these tests are discussed and compared to explosively driven collapsing TWC results in the literature and to existing analytical models for spontaneous adiabatic shear localization.

Dynamic characterization of strength properties is done, in common practice by the means of a Split-Hopkinson Pressure Bar (also named Kolsky-Bar) apparatus. In such systems, strain rates are limited up to ∼ 5 ⋅ 103 sec−1. For higher strain rates, the strain rate hardening is assumed to be the same as that measured at lower rates, with no direct measurement to validate the assumptions used for this extrapolation. In this work we are using a pulsed current generator (PCG) to create electro-magnetic (EM) driving forces on expanding cylinders. Most standard techniques for creating EM driving forces on cylinders or rings, as reported in the literature, reach strain rates of 1e3-1e4. Using our PCG, characterized by a fast rise time, we reach strain rates of ∼1e5, thus paving the way to a standard technique to measure strength at very high strain rates. To establish the experimental technique, we conducted a numerical study of the expanding cylinder set up using 2D hydrodynamic simulations to reach the desired high strain rates.