Simulation of hard-soft material interaction under impact loading employing the material point method

Understanding the mechanisms of hard-soft material interaction under impact loading is important not only in the defense industry but also in daily life. However, traditional mesh-based spatial discretization methods that are time consuming owing to the need for frequent re-meshing, such as the finite element method and finite difference method, can hardly handle large deformation involving failure evolution in a multi-phase interaction environment. The objective of this research is to develop a quasi-meshless particle method based on the material point method for the model-based simulation of the hard-soft material interaction response. To demonstrate the proposed procedure, scenarios of a hard-soft material impact test are considered, where a force is applied to layers of materials and a hard bar with an initial velocity impacts a target with layers of different materials. The stress wave propagation and resulting failure evolution are simulated and compared with available data. Future research tasks are then discussed on the basis of the preliminary results.