Uintah Simulations of Perforation Experiments

Perforation

ABSTRACT: A simulation of a simple penetration experiment is performed using Material Point Method (MPM) through the Uintah Computational Framework (UCF) and interpreted using the post-processing visualization program VisIt. MPM formatting sets a background mesh with explicit boundaries and monitors the interaction of particles within that mesh to predict the varying movements and orientations of a material in response to loads. The modeled experiment compares the effects of an aluminum sphere impacting an aluminum sheet at varying velocities. In this work, the experiment called launch T-1428 (by Piekutowski and Poorman) is simulated using UCF and VisIt. The two materials in the experiment are both simulated using a hypoelastic-plastic model. Varying grid resolutions were used to verify the convergent behavior of the simulations to the experimental results. The validity of the simulation is quantified by comparing perforation hole diameter. A full 3-D simulation followed and was also compared to experimental results. Results and issues in both 2-D and 3-D simulation efforts are discussed. Both the axisymmetric and 3-D simulation results provided very good data with clear convergent behavior.

See the link below for the full report.

Experiment in Uintah

Continue reading

Abstract: Deformation and Fracture of Heterogeneous Media using Boundary-Conforming Convected Particle Characteristic Functions in the Material Point Method

This is an abstract for

NWU2013: Advances in Computational Mechanics with Emphasis on Fracture and Multiscale Phenomena. Workshop honoring Professor Ted Belytschko’s 70th Birthday.  April 18, 2013 – April 20, 2013, Evanston, IL, USA

The organizers allocated only 10 minutes for each person’s talk (including big wigs like Tom Hughes), so we might just present this topic in the form of a puppet show with enough information to tickle the audience to chat with us about it in the hallway!

Authors:

Rebecca Brannon*, Alireza Sadeghirad,  James Guilkey

Department of Mechanical Engineering

University of Utah

Salt Lake City, UT, 84112

*Email: Rebecca.Brannon@utah.edu

Continue reading

Publications: Nonuniqueness and instability of classical formulations of nonassociative plasticity

A plot of the frequency-dependent wave propagation velocity for the case study problem with an overlocal plasticity model, with the elastic and local hardening wave speeds shown for reference (left). Stress histories using an overlocal plasticity model with a nonlocal length scale of 1m and a mesh resolution of 0.125m (right)

The following series of three articles (with common authors J. Burghardt and R. Brannon of the University of Utah) describes a state of insufficient experimental validation of conventional formulations of nonassociative plasticity (AKA nonassociated and non-normality).  This work provides a confirmation that such models theoretically admit negative net work in closed strain cycles, but this simple prediction has never been validated or disproved in the laboratory!

  1. An early (mostly failed) attempt at experimental investigation of unvalidated plasticity assumptions (click to view),
  2. A simple case study confirming that nonassociativity can cause non-unique and unstable solutions to wave motion problems (click to view),
  3. An extensive study showing that features like rate dependence, hardening, etc. do not eliminate the instability and also showing that it is NOT related to conventional localization (click to view).

Continue reading