Constitutive modeling of shock response of polytetrafluoroethylene

Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is a polymer with a simple atomic structure that shows complex behavior under pressure and demonstrates a highly variable metastable phase structure in shock waves with amorphous and crystalline components. In turn, the crystalline component has four known phases with the high-pressure transition of the crystalline domain from crystalline phase IV at ambient through phase II to III. At the same time, as has been recently studied using spectrometry, the crystalline region nucleates from the amorphous one with load. Stress and velocity shock-wave profiles acquired recently with embedded gauges demonstrate features that may be related to the impedance mismatch between the phase domains subjected to such transitions resulting in variations of mechanical and thermophysical characteristics. We consider the inter-phase non-equilibrium and the amorphous-to-crystalline and inter-crystalline transitions that are associated with the high pressure and temperature transformations under shock wave loading as possible candidates for the analysis. The present work utilizes a multi-phase constitutive model that considers strength effects to describe the observed response under shock loading of the PTFE material. Experimental plate impact shock-wave histories are compared with calculated profiles using kinetics describing the transitions. The study demonstrates that the inter-phase pressure non-equilibrium of the state parameters plays the key role in the delay of the shock wave attenuation. At the same time, the forward transition associated with the crystallization might be responsible for the velocity spike in the experimental velocity profiles at high impact velocity and the modulus variation at low impact velocity. On the other hand, an accelerated attenuation of the velocity in the rarefaction wave is associated with another transition resulting in the residual crystallinity change during unloading.