On a viscous critical-stress model of martensitic phase transitions

The solid-to-solid phase transitions that result from shock loading of certain materials, such as the graphite-to-diamond transition and the transition in iron, have long been subjects of a substantial theoretical and experimental literature. Recently a model for such transitions was introduced which, based on a CS condition CS and without use of fitting parameters, accounts quantitatively for existing observations in a number of systems Bruno and Vaynblat, Proc. R. Soc. London, Ser. A 457, 2871 2001 . While the results of the CS model match the main features of the available experimental data, disagreements in some details between the predictions of this model and experiment, attributable to an ideal character of the CS model, do exist. In this article we present a version of the CS model, the viscous CS model vCS , as well as a numerical method for its solution. This model and the corresponding solver results in a much improved overall CS modeling capability. The innovations we introduce include: 1 Enhancement of the model by inclusion of viscous phase-transition effects; as well as a numerical solver that allows for a fully rigorous treatment of both, the 2 Rarefaction fans which had previously been approximated by “rarefaction discontinuities” , and 3 viscous phase-transition effects, that are part of the vCS model. In particular we show that the vCS model accounts accurately for well known “gradual” rises in the transition which, in the original CS model, were somewhat crudely approximated as jump discontinuities. © 2007 American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.2778634