A CAD-Based Software Tool for Design and Analysis of Materials under Ballistic Impact

In battlefield environments, ballistic impact may result in the failure of military structures and materials, including armor. 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 ballistic impact. One is adiabatic shear and the other is spall fracture. Simulation of these two phenomena is challenging due to several reasons such as existence of shock wave, large deflection and, hence, need for continuous updating of mesh, inaccurate thermo-mechanical coupling, and computational instability. Furthermore, there is lack of a user-friendly software tool to model structural response due to such impact. Therefore, the proposed work is geared towards developing a mathematically consistent and robust numerical algorithm that accurately captures these two phenomena using meshfree particle method and integrates the solution algorithm in an easy-to-use CAD-based software framework.