Simulations for the explosion in a water-filled tube including cavitation using the SPH method

Abstract

The damage to a structure due to an underwater explosion, which must necessarily include the phenomenon of cavitation, is a difficult problem to simulate. In this paper, the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method is used to address the simulation of a fully explicit three-dimensional (3D) underwater explosion in a rigid or deformable cylinder, incorporating properly the physical phenomenon of cavitation. To this purpose, a general 3D SPH code has been implemented using the Open-MP programming interface. The various components of the code have been validated using four test cases, namely the Sjogreen test case for validation of the Riemann solver, the 1D cavitating flow in an open tube test case for validation of the cavitation model, the 1D pentaerythritol tetranitrate detonation test case for validation of the Jones–Wilkins–Lee model and a 3D high-velocity impact test case for validation of the elastic–perfectly plastic constitutive model. Following this validation, a 3D explosion within a water-filled rigid cylinder and a water-filled deformable aluminum tube are simulated with the general SPH code. The results of these simulations are compared against some available experimental data and some numerical simulations obtained using an alternative approach. These comparisons are generally in good agreement with both the experimental and numerical data, demonstrating that the SPH method can be used to simulate general 3D underwater explosion problems.