Numerical study of damage in particulate composites during high-strain rate loading using novel damage model

Abstract

We perform large three-dimensional damage simulations of particulate composites under high-strain rate loading to address the effect of the microstructure on the overall transient mechanical behavior. We use spheres as well as oblate, prolate, and plane strain ellipsoids and show that resolving the wide range of spatial and temporal scales in complex morphologies is essential to apprehending fracture characteristics. We employ continuum damage mechanics and develop a novel damage model that properly accounts for deviatoric and volumetric energy contributions in the finite strain setting. In order to resolve the characteristic damage length-scale, we utilize a highly parallel finite element solver, PGFem3D. The high-performance parallel simulations are performed on up to 1920 processing cores. We adopt a data-driven (image-based) materials modeling approach in constructing the computational domains. We show that high-strain rates as well as microstructural details play an important role in addressing complex damage patterns and overall material response.