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A split Hopkinson pressure bar apparatus driven by a pendulum hammer was used to perform uniaxial compression tests to examine the degradation process of green sandstone subjected to repetitive impact loading. The acoustic characteristics, dissipated energy, deformation characteristics, and microstructure evolution were investigated. The representative stress-strain curve can be broken into five stages that were characterized by changes in the axial strain response during impact loading. Both the ultrasonic wave velocity and cumulative dissipated energy exhibited obvious three-stage behavior with respect to the impact number. As the impact number increased, more than one peak was observed in the frequency spectra, and the relative weight of the peak frequency increased in the low-frequency range. According to the evolution of the ultrasonic wave velocity, the degradation process was divided into three stages. By comparing the intact stage I and early stage II microcrack development patterns, the initiation of new cracks and elongation of existing cracks were identified as the main degradation mechanisms. Furthermore, a slight increase in the number of cracks was observed, and microcrack lengths steadily increased. Moreover, due to the low level of microcrack damage, the deformation mechanism was mainly characterized by volume compression during impact loading. In late stage II, the main degradation mechanism was the elongation of existing cracks. Additionally, as microcracks accumulated in the rock samples, cracks were arranged parallel to the loading direction, which led to volume dilation. In stage III, microcracks continued to elongate nearly parallel to the loading direction and then linked to each other, which led to intense degradation in the rock samples. In this stage, rock sample deformation was mainly characterized by volume dilation during impact loading. Finally, rock samples were split into blocks with fractures oriented subparallel to the loading direction. These results can improve the understanding of the stability evaluations of rock structures subjected to repetitive impact loading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Split-Hopkinson pressure bar (SHPB) tests driven by pendulum hammer, employing a proper special shape striker is an effective way to obtain dynamic stress equilibrium condition and to get constant strain rate of the rock specimen. To find the proper special shape striker, a striker with a cambered surface was introduced and eight geometrically different hammers were designed to analyze the effect of hammer geometry on the waveform of excited incident stress waves. Based on experiments and simulations, parameter effects, including the cambered hammer curvature radius and hammer diameter, length, and impact velocity, on the incident wave shape were examined. These parametric studies provided guidelines for achieving constant strain rates in rock specimens during SHPB tests. The use of different diameter hammers was noted for shaping stress-time curves to follow the stress-strain behavior of green sandstone. Finally, to examine the applicability of using hammer geometry for shaping incident waves to achieve constant strain rate, SHPB tests on green sandstone specimens were conducted. The results demonstrated that a constant strain rate (100 s−1) lasting for 70 μs was achieved with the 8# hammer (3.7 kg; curvature radius, diameter, and length of 100, 70, and 126.3 mm, resp.). In addition, dynamic experiments on green sandstone were carried out under various strain rates and the results showed that the initial tangential modulus was almost unaffected by strain rate. The strain at peak stress tended to increase with rising strain rate and the dynamic strength of green sandstone showed an apparent rate dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]