Meshfree Simulation of Adiabatic Shear Band and Spall Fracture for Materials and Structures under Ballistic Impacts and Penetrations

In battlefield environments, ballistic impact may result in the failure of military structures and materials. In order to improve the reliability and safety of military structures and materials, it is important to study material failure under ballistic impact in the design stage. There are two main failure phenomena related to the material response due to a high-speed ballistic impact. One is adiabatic shear and the other is spall fracture. Simulations of these two phenomena are challenging due to the existence of large deflection and sharp discontinuity caused by shock waves and shear bands. In order to model these effects, a traditional finite element method requires insertion of discontinuous elements, very refined mesh, continuous mesh updating, and a priori knowledge of the spatial location of shear band to simulate these phenomena. A meshfree method alleviates these problems largely. Therefore, the proposed work is geared towards developing mathematically consistent and robust numerical algorithms that accurately capture adiabatic shear band and spall fracture in 2-D and 3-D structures using meshfree particle method. The developed software module will be easy to use and will be made to work in conjunction with existing commercial finite element software tools