Impact of a Rigid Sphere on a Viscoelastic Plate

Abstract

The dynamic, rigid, spherical indenter problem for the case of a thin viscoelastic plate is treated, and a numerical method is developed to handle the resulting equations of motion for a general linear viscoelastic material. Application to a constant tan δ model and comparison with experimental results indicate that the ball-bouncing technique can be extended to thin plate samples by the present theory if the loss tangent for the material is reasonably low.