1008 Advances in Computational Structural Mechanics for Extreme Loading Environments

 

Recent technical advancements and security concerns has led to a significant increase in the use of numerical simulation of events involving short duration, high-intensity and impulsive loading of buildings, vehicles and infrastructure. This increase has been driven by many synergistic factors, including the availability of larger scale and faster computational resources; development of new algorithms and lumped mass higher-order elements, numerical methods, and material models; and the increased expense of experimental testing. The use of numerical simulation to assess the effect of high intensity and impulsive environments in structural applications has enabled a new look at old problems that were either infeasible or impractical to examine in previous years. Likewise, many problems that were on too large a time and/or length scale to examine experimentally have now become accessible with the use of numerical simulation. The nature of these applications typically involve some of the most challenging aspects in structural mechanics, such as nonlinear material behavior under large strains and/or high strain rates, large and nonlinear deformations, failure and dynamic fracture, initiation, burning, and detonation of energetic materials, phase change and transition, and high velocity contact and friction. In addition, new materials and construction practices have resulted in the need for different material theories and modeling procedures. Use of airblast, explosive detonation, and other Eulerian codes has also become an important aspect of simulation. Efficient and accurate code coupling methodologies are typically engrained in these applications since the evolution of the loading environments, as well as the resulting deformation of the structure, as often too complex to be handled by a single code. Hardware advances have made it possible to conduct simulations in three dimensions on unprecedented length and timescales. Numerical simulation is playing an ever-increasing important role in protective structure design and analysis, in areas that for decades have been dominated by experimental evaluation.

The purpose of this mini-symposium is to provide a forum for technical presentation and exchange, establish communication and collaboration between academic, government and industrial software researchers in the field of computational mechanics for high-rate severe loading applications. Papers dealing with theoretical developments, multi-spectral physics coupling, new higher-order and isogeometric element technologies, meshfree modeling, algorithms and numerical methods, implementation and parallel computational issues, new constitutive modeling, experimental validation, and practical applications are all welcome.