Modeling of Hypervelocity Impact Experiments Using Gamma-SPH Technique

Abstract

A series of experiments were performed to study plastic deformation of metallic plates under hypervelocity impact at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Center for Materials and Structures using a two-stage light gas gun. In these experiments, cylindrical Lexan projectiles were fired at A36 steel target plates with velocities range of 4.5–6.0 km/s. Experiments were designed to produce a front side impact crater and a permanent bulging deformation on the back surface of the target without inducing complete perforation of the plates. Free surface velocities from the back surface of target plate were measured using the newly developed Multiplexed Photonic Doppler Velocimetry (MPDV) system. To simulate the experiments, a Lagrangian-based smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is typically used to avoid the problems associated with mesh instability. Despite their intrinsic capability for simulation of violent impacts, particle methods have a few drawbacks that may considerably affect their accuracy and performance including, lack of interpolation completeness, tensile instability, and existence of spurious pressure. Moreover, computational time is also a strong limitation that often necessitates the use of reduced 2D axisymmetric models. To address these shortcomings, IMPETUS Afea Solver® implemented a newly developed SPH formulation that can solve the problems regarding spurious pressures and tensile instability. The algorithm takes full advantage of GPU Technology for parallelization of the computation and opens the door for running large 3D models (20,000,000 particles). The combination of accurate algorithms and drastically reduced computation time now makes it possible to run a high fidelity hypervelocity impact model.