On what controls the spacing of spontaneous adiabatic shear bands in collapsing thick-walled cylinders

Shear bands formation in collapsing thick walled cylinders occurs in a spontaneous manner. The advantage of examining spontaneous, as opposed to forced shear localization, is that it highlights the inherent susceptibility of the material to adiabatic shear banding without prescribed geometrical constraints. The Thick-Walled Cylinder technique (TWC) provides a controllable and repeatable technique to create and study multiple adiabatic shear bands. The technique, reported in the literature uses an explosive cylinder to create the driving force, collapsing the cylindrical sample. Recently, we developed an electro-magnetic set-up using a pulsed current generator to provide the collapsing force, replacing the use of explosives. Using this platform we examined the shear band evolution at different stages of formation in 7 metallic alloys, spanning a wide range of strength and failure properties. We examined the number of shear bands and spacing between them for the different materials to try and figure out what controls these parameters. The examination of the different materials enabled us to better comprehend the mechanisms which control the spatial distribution of multiple shear bands in this geometry. The results of these tests are discussed and compared to explosively driven collapsing TWC results in the literature and to existing analytical models for spontaneous adiabatic shear localization