A NEW METHOD FOR ANALYZING DISPERSED BAR GAUGE DATA

A new method is developed for analysing dispersed stress (or strain) s ignals from a Hopkinson bar. In this method the incident signal is wri tten as a rectangular-windowed Fourier series. It treats dispersion by accounting for both the time of arrival of the various frequencies an d the associated phase shifts in a dispersed signal. An analysis of a shock wave generated by a sphere of high explosives in a water tank sh ows that this method gives better resolved peaks than the existing FFT method, for signals from blast waves. It also gives an indication of when components exist in the signal that are not due to dispersive pro pagation.