An Experimental Study on Damping Effect of RPUF Under Compressive Load

Reinforced polyurethane foam (RPUF) is one of important materials of Mark III type insulation system used in LNG cargo containment system. But RPUF is the most difficult material to deal with in the numerical approach for the safety assessment, because there is little public and reliable data on its mechanical properties, and even some public data have relatively large difference between them. In this study, in order to investigate the structural response of the system under compressive loads such as sloshing action, time dependent characteristics of RPUF were examined by experiments. A series of compressive load tests of the insulation system including RPUF under various temperature conditions was carried out by using specimens with rectangular section. As the results, the relationship between deformation of RPUF and time is linear and dependent on the loading rate, so the concept of strain-rate could be applied to the analysis of the insulation system. Also, it was found that the spring constant tends to converge to a value as the loading rate increased, and the convergence level is dependent on temperature.