Abstract: The variation in characteristic values of stress waves before and after passing through a material serves as a critical basis for evaluating its wave attenuation capacity. This can be characterized by the ratio of transmitted wave amplitude to the initial incident wave amplitude (i.e., transmission coefficient) in SHPB tests. However, due to the close correlation between the transmission coefficient and waveform parameters, it remains challenging to establish a quantitative characterization method for the transmission coefficient. Therefore, this study focuses on porous, irregular, and fragile calcareous sand as the research object. By combining physical experiments with numerical simulations, we investigate the influence of pulse width, platform duration, rising edge rate, falling edge rate, peak stress, and the central axis of symmetry on the transmission coefficient of calcareous sand. It is found that the transmission coefficient responds significantly to the coupling effects of the pulse width and the central axis of symmetry of the stress wave, the coupling effects of the platform section duration and the rising and falling edge rates, the coupling effects of the pulse width and the peak stress, as well as the coupling effects of the falling edge rate and the pulse width. Conversely, the response to the coupled effects of peak stress, rising edge rate, and falling edge rate is not pronounced. Owing to the difficulty in completely decoupling these waveform parameters, a prediction method is proposed for the transmission coefficient based on the gradient boosting algorithm, which effectively addresses multi-factor coupling issues. When the number of training samples reaches 91, the prediction accuracy exceeds 96%, which can effectively establish the mapping relationship between waveform parameters and transmission coefficients, providing a reference basis for the load design and calculation of protective engineering structures.

Key words: calcareous sand, transmission coefficient, LS-DYNA finite element, SHPB impact test, gradient boosting algorithm