A new S-shaped specimen geometry is developed in this study to investigate the shear behavior of materials under dynamic shear condition. Traditionally, hat-shaped geometry is used to study the dynamic shear of materials by a conventional split Hopkinson pressure bar apparatus. However, in this geometry, the force equilibrium on the two sides of the sample is difficult to fulfill, and the stress field in the shear region is not homogeneous. Hence, the calculated shear stress-strain curve from this geometry is not precise. To overcome this problem, the new S-shaped specimen is designed to achieve accurate shear stress-strain curve. This geometry can be used in a wide range of strain rates and does not require additional machining process for microstructure observation. The new S-shaped specimen is successfully coupled with digital image correlation method because of the flat surface. Digital image correlation results indicate that the fracture patterns of the new S-shaped specimen occur with maximum shear strains in the shear region in the middle of the sample. This result is also validated by finite element model simulation. The new S-shaped specimen geometry can be used to study the dynamic shear behavior of various metals.Metals 2019, 9, 838 2 of 17 force equilibrium [11]. Thus, the calculated shear stress-strain from this geometry is a rough estimate and inaccurate [19,23]. In addition, the shearing region rotates during testing due to the overlapping nature of the shear area in this geometry. To overcome these problems, Ran et al. [24] adopted the flat hat-shaped sample combined with digital image correlation (DIC) measurement. They measured force and punching displacement from the split Hopkinson pressure bar (SHPB) and shear strain by the DIC method. They achieved accurate strain rate and also calculated the shear engineering stress and strain using the DIC method. However, without using the DIC method, obtaining the shear stress-strain curve is impossible using this geometry. Rittel et al.[3] developed a new geometry for shear test. In this sample, by applying compressive loading a shear dominant field occurs in the gauge section. This geometry can be used in static and dynamic loadings, as well as in different temperatures. However, this sample design does not constitute a 'simple' shear loading stress state within the gauge section but a rather three-dimensional stress state. Moreover, this geometry leads to a radial inertial effect of the sample motion under dynamic loading [19]. Recently, Xu et al. [11] proposed a new double side sample to study the shear band. They observed good agreement between the experimental and simulation results in a wide range of strain rates. However, they designed a special sample fixture to ensure that the shear would be symmetrical. They also used an aluminium bar as the transmitted bar because of the weak transferred pulse. Gray et al. [19] also designed a compact forced simple shear sample to study shear localization in materials. Although this sample could produce pu...