Effect of rubber particles and fibers on the dynamic compressive behavior of novel ultra-lightweight cement composites: Numerical simulations and metamodeling

Abstract

This paper presents, first, a finite element (FE) model for a rubberized ultra-lightweight cement composite (RULCC), which uses a modified Holmquist-Johnson-Concrete (H-J-C) constitutive law that is calibrated and validated by new Split Hopkinson pressure bar (SHPB) tests on the material. The validated FE model is used then as the core of a cloud computing platform using a multi node cloud simulation framework to carry out the parametric simulations, which generate required data to develop a meta-model to predict the dynamic impact strength of the RULCC. Design of experiment (DoE) and Generic Programming techniques are the main instruments in developing meta-models with reduced size of data. Finally, a meta-model of explicit expression, which is the first of its kind and considers the effect of rubber ratio, fiber ratio and dynamic impact strain rate, is proposed to predict the dynamic impact strength of the RULCC.