USNCCM-11 Minisymposium: Advances in Modeling Damage and Failure at High Strain Rates

11th US National Congress on Computational Mechanics, Minneapolis, July 25-29, 2011
Minisymposium 8.4  Advances in Modeling Damage and Failure at High Strain Rates
For abstract submission, go to the conference website at http://usnccm.org/ or click here
Abstract submission deadline: January 31, 2011

Engineering materials and structures are required to withstand extreme dynamic loads (e.g., blast, impact) for a wide range of applications in the transportation, energy, and defense sectors. There is, therefore, a strong need for analytical and computational tools which are capable of predicting the behavior of materials/structures under such extreme operating (or accident) conditions. In concert with such model development, there is a need for highly resolved spatial and temporal diagnostics to uncover the underlying physical mechanisms of dynamic failure via laboratory experiments, as well as model parameter calibration and model validation. Developing computationally efficient modeling strategies which possess the required predictive capability is a non-trivial task. For instance, property degradation, and ultimately failure, occur as the result of the interaction between different physical processes (e.g. void/microcrack nucleation and evolution leading to strain localization and/or fracture) taking place at different length and time scales. This implies that (1) physically-based models built on a good understanding of the underlying physical processes, and their dependence on kinetic effects (e.g. strain rate), spatial effects (e.g. microstructural features/defects), as well as on stochastic effects (e.g. defect distribution and uncertainty), and (2) analytical and computational methods capable of representing/resolving the relevant spatial and temporal effects/scales efficiently and without introducing any spurious numerical artifacts or mesh dependency, are two necessary ingredients in successful computational modeling strategies for dynamic damage evolution, localization, and failure. This minisymposium welcomes presentations focusing on such computational modeling strategies and their algorithmic implementation, as well as coordinated experiments for parameter calibration and model validation.

Organizers:
Hashem M. Mourad, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Francis L. Addessio, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Richard Regueiro, University of Colorado at Boulder