Inductive Heating of Materials for the Study of High Temperature Mechanical Properties

Summary form only given. In any high-energy pulsed power experiment, the metallic conductors are expected to heat up significantly due to resistive losses. In the pulsed case, the effects of local heat transfer are decreased due to the limited thermal diffusion so the process is considered to be adiabatic rather than isothermal. Experimental evidence from electron beam heating indicates that high-temperature mechanical properties significantly depend on the rapidity and duration of heat deposition. With this in mind, it is important to understand the mechanical properties of metals when heated rapidly so that the correct mechanical properties are considered when designing high-energy experiments, such as railguns, where both the thermal and mechanical stresses are high. An expanding ring experiment, similar to the one originally designed by Grady and Gourdin, has been set up at the Institute for Advanced Technology (IAT) to test such mechanical properties. The data generated will quantify the rate of heating sensitivity of material properties in commonly used materials for development and validation of appropriate constitutive equations.