Impact of rigid angular particles with fully-plastic targets Part I: Analysis

The erosion of substrates of arbitrary dynamic hardness and friction coefficient, due to the impact of individual angular particles, was analyzed with the purpose of predicting crater size, shape, and rebound parameters as a function of incident particle velocity, angle, orientation, and shape. A rigid-plastic theory due to Hutchings (International Journal of Mechanical Sciences 1997; 19:45–52), developed for square plates impacting frictionless surfaces, is generalized for arbitrarily shaped particles impacting surfaces having nonzero friction. The specific case of symmetric angular particles of arbitrary angularity is studied in detail. The model is shown to match Hutchings’ [1] experimental data for square steel plates on smooth steel surfaces. In a companion paper (Papini, Spelt, under review), a parametric study of the input parameters is presented.