Click here to see an invited talk for the 2013 Advances in Computational Mechanics Conference celebrating the 70th birthday of Thomas J.R. Hughes.
Click here to see an invited talk for the 2013 Advances in Computational Mechanics Conference celebrating the 70th birthday of Thomas J.R. Hughes.
University of Utah CSM Group 
Hello Rebecca –
Congratulations on being an invited speaker at Tom’s B-Day.
For the buried charge simulation, do you include the air Material Point Method simulation?
If not, how do you justify omitting the air blast portion of the loading – assuming the end application is loading of a vehicle?
–len
Sorry I didn’t see your comment until now. This project is in its early stages, so we are lucky just to have a simulation run at all! The end application is, of course, blast loading to a vehicle, but our role in the project is much smaller. We are to model small-scale buried explosives in a centrifuge with no mandate to predict vehicle or personnel damage in a large scale problem. In either case, modeling of the air blast would eventually need to be included. That’s something that Utah’s Uintah code was originally designed to do — its original reason for existence was to model fluid-solid-gas interactions in high-rate large-deformation problems of containers bursting in a fire. In early stages of a project like this one, we are neglecting air resistance in order to focuson the soil response. A baby step towards a more realistic treatment would be to accomodate Robin boundary conditions at the soil-air interface, which would surely be better than using natural (zero traction) conditions. I’m surprised that our community doesn’t use Robin boundary conditions more often. They appear only in disguise as transmitting (absorbing) boundary conditions at the outer edge of Eulerian simulations.