5. Material Characterization of Pin-Core Latex Polymer Foam Under Static and Dynamic Loads

Cellular polymer foams find extensive applications as energy absorbers under static, impact and blast loads due to their capacity to absorb energy under constant stress up to full densification strain (Ashby et al. Metal foams: a design guide. Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 2000 [1]; Gibson and Ashby, Cellular solids: structure and properties. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999 [2]). In the present paper, the material characterization of natural latex cellular polymer foam used in the field air blast experiments (Venkataramana et al. Proc Eng 173:547–554, 2017 [3]; Venkataramana et al. Numerical simulation of blast wave mitigation using foam impregnated with water. DAE BRNS Symposium on Multiscale Modeling of Materials and Devices (MMMD-2014), 2014 [4]) performed to assess the blast mitigation effect of fluid-filled open-cell pin-core polymer foam is presented. Static compression tests were performed to study the quasi-static behavior of the pin-core latex polymer foam. The Ogden hyper-elastic material parameters are determined from the analysis of static compression test data using ADINA (automatic dynamic incremental nonlinear analysis) v 9.2, ADINA R&D, Inc., Watertown [5]). Further, results of the static compression tests on dry foam and water-saturated foam are compared and discussed. In addition, the dynamic behavior of the pin-core latex cellular foam is investigated by conducting drop tower impact experiment and numerical simulation of the drop tower experiment using LS-DYNA (LS-DYNA v971, Livermore Software Technology Corporation, Livermore [6]). The stress–time history from the drop tower experiment is compared with that of simulation, and good correlation is found between the two sets of results.