Abstract
A driving technical concern for the automobile industry is their assurance that developed windshield products meet Federal safety standards. Besides conducting innumerable glass breakage experiments, product developers also have the option of utilizing numerical approaches that can provide further insight into glass impact breakage, fracture, and fragmentation. The combined finite-discrete element method (FDEM) is one such tool and was used in this study to investigate 3D impact glass fracture processes. To enable this analysis, a generalized traction-separation model, which defines the constitutive relationship between the traction and separation in FDEM cohesive zone models, was introduced. The mechanical responses of a laminated glass and a glass plate under impact were then analyzed. For laminated glass, an impact fracture process was investigated and results were compared against corresponding experiments. Correspondingly, two glass plate impact fracture patterns, i.e., concentric fractures and radial fractures, were simulated. The results show that for both cases, FDEM simulated fracture processes and fracture patterns are in good agreement with the experimental observations. The work demonstrates that FDEM is an effective tool for modeling of fracture and fragmentation in glass.
Highlights
It is a well-known fact that a great number of traffic accidents result in windshield breakage that unduly causes great harm to automobile to both passengers and pedestrians
Bios et al simulated the impact of a sphere into a glass plate and the behavior of a windscreen during a roof crash via the finite element method (FEM), where failed elements were deleted from the calculation after the strain was greater than a pre-set failure strain [2]
The main contribution of this work is the presentation of a generalized traction-separation model that further advances the fracture and fragmentation methodologies for finite-discrete element method (FDEM)
Summary
It is a well-known fact that a great number of traffic accidents result in windshield breakage that unduly causes great harm to automobile to both passengers and pedestrians. Peng et al simulated the mechanical behavior of a windshield-laminated glass given the impact of a pedestrian’s head using an element deletion approach implemented in a commercial finite element code [6]. Wang et al compared four different numerical methods (i.e., FEM, XFEM, DEM, FDEM) for the fracture of brittle materials with specific reference to glass [18]. They concluded that FDEM yields the most satisfactory performance for the modeling of the dynamic fracture of materials. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: a brief overview of FDEM is introduced in order to provide the reader with a general framework of the method; a generalized traction-separation model for modeling fracture and fragmentation is introduced; a laminated glass impact fracture simulation is presented; FDEM glass plate fracture pattern phenomenology is discussed
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