Plastic Failure of Ductile Beams Loaded Dynamically

It is shown herein how simple rigid-plastic methods may be used to predict the large inelastic deformations of fully clamped beams loaded impulsively, and to estimate the threshold velocities at which failure due to either tensile tearing or shearing occurs at the supports of beams. The approximate theoretical methods give surprisingly reasonable agreement with the recent experimental tests of Menkes and Opat [1] on aluminum 6061 T6 beams.