Herein, we present a self-similar cavity expansion model that follows from the work of Cohen and Durban (2013b) to analyze the dynamic indentation response of elasto-plastic porous materials while accounting for the plastic strain gradient induced size effect. The incorporation of the plastic strain gradient induced size effect in the dynamic cavity expansion model for elasto-plastic porous materials is the key novelty of our model. The predictions of the cavity expansion model for the material hardness, for different indentation depths and speeds, are compared against the available experimental results for OFHC copper, for strain rates varying from 10−4 s−1 to 108 s−1. We note that despite several simplifying assumptions, the predictions of our cavity expansion model show a reasonable agreement with the experimentally measured material hardness over a wide range of indentation depths and speeds. In addition, we have also carried out parametric analyses to elucidate the specific roles of indentation speed, size effect and initial porosity, on the material hardness and cavitation fields that develop during the indentation process. In particular, our parametric analyses show that there exists a critical value of the indentation speed beyond which the contribution of inertial effect becomes extremely important and the material hardness increases rapidly. While the influence of the initial porosity on the material hardness is found to increase with increasing indentation speed and decrease with increasing size effect.
A Dynamic Cavity Expansion Model for Rigid Projectile Penetration into Concrete considering the Compressibility and Nonlinear Constitutive Relations