Molecular dynamics study on the shock induced spallation of polyethylene

Our latest article in the Journal of Applied Physics is freely available for 14 days: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0072249

 We conducted molecular dynamics simulations of plate impact tests of polyethylene to obtain molecular-level insights on two common approximations associated with the interpretation of shock pressure and spall strength. Our results revealed

(1) The free surface approximation can slightly underpredict the shock pressure in the polymer.

(2) The spall strength computed from the free surface velocity history can be significantly smaller than the actual tensile stress in the region of spallation.

 Our MD (LAMMPS) and DFT (VASP) models are freely available here: https://github.com/nuwan-d/shock_response_pe