1. Introduction

Exploring the potentials of advanced materials and structures for serving in extreme conditions has been a hot research topic for decades [1–5]. Materials and material technologies can be tailored nowadays for the applications in structural engineering. In recent years, impactresistant devices and structures have received considerable attention because of the engineering requirements of safety and security. They require the dedicated design concepts and optimized material properties. Most materials currently available lead to the increase in weight and/or volume of structures and devices for meeting the impact-resistant requirements. In many cases, these increases are unacceptable in structure design. For solving this problem, the trend in materials is towards weight reduction and strength increase at reasonable costs. Material technologies are enablers to meet these requirements. They provide the potential to design advanced materials with high special strength (strength-to-weight ratio) and toughness for the applications in dynamic events.

© 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Polymer materials have become a widely concerned research focus in extreme conditions because of their outstanding performances, such as impact resistance, rate dependency, corrosion resistance, low density, easy moulding and so on. Even more, in some engineering applications, they show outstanding advantages and replace the traditional metals and nonmetallic materials [1, 2].

Therefore, understanding the dynamic mechanical behaviour of polymers is necessary. Especially, the investigations of polymers in explosion, shock, collision and other related mechanical behaviour under impact loading have both theoretical and practical significances. In this chapter, the current research program of dynamic mechanical behaviour of various representative polymers is presented.
