The strength always exists before the material melts. In this paper, the viscoelastic-plastic model is applied to improve the finite difference method, and the numerical solutions for the disturbance amplitude damping behavior of the sinusoidal shock front in a flyer-impact experiment are obtained. When the aluminum is shocked to 101 GPa, the effect of elasto-plasticity on the zero-amplitude point of the oscillatory damping curve is the same as that of viscosity when η= 700 Pa.s, and the real shear viscosity coefficient of the shocked aluminum is determined to be about 2800±100 Pa.s. Comparing the experiment data with the numerical results of the viscoelastic-plastic model, we find that the aluminum is close to melting at 101 GPa.
A fiber-array probe is designed to measure the damping behavior of a small perturbed shock wave in an opaque substance, by which the effective viscosity of substance under the condition of high temperature and high pressure can be constrained according to the flyer-impact technique. It shows that the measurement precision of the shock arrival time by using this technique is within 2 ns. To easily compare with the results given by electrical pin technique, the newly developed method is used to investigate the effective viscosity of aluminum （Al）. The shear viscosity coefficient of A1 is determined to be 1700 Pa.s at 71 GPa with a strain rate of 3.6× 10^6 s-1, which is in good agreement with the results of other methods. The advantage of the new technique over the electrical pin one is that it is applicable for studying the non-conductive substances.
