Ductile fracture at high velocity impact of cylindrical tubes

Abstract

Study of impact problems is of great interest in many engineering fields, such as automotive industry, aircraft industry, defense industry etc. Orbital debris impact on space station, crash-worthiness of automobiles etc. are few examples of impact problems. Impact problems are characterized by short duration, large plastic deformation, high strain rates, rapid dissipation of energy, thermal softening etc. Contact-impact problems like crash-worthiness of vehicles, impact testing etc often involve ductile fracture. Ductile fracture is a mode of failure in which voids either pre-existing within the material or nucleated during deformation grow until they link together or coalesce to form a continuous fracture path. The continuum damage mechanics model of Lemaitre is one of the most commonly used approaches to study ductile fracture. A number of studies on damage growth and fracture simulation, in static processes have been carried out using this approach. However, number of such studies on the prediction of fracture in impact problems are limited. In the present work, damage growth, and effect of high strain rate are studied for ductile fracture during high velocity impact of cylindrical tubes using commercial finite element software ABAQUS/Explicit.