316 Developments in the Material-Point Method

 

In recent years, a number of alternatives to standard finite element methods (FEM) have been proposed for the solution of engineering problems in continuum mechanics, particularly those involving very large deformations. One alternative to FEM is meshfree methods. The material-point method (MPM) is a hybrid method that uses Lagrangian material points that move freely through the problem domain relative to a background mesh. These points carry information about the solution and depict the geometry, while interactions between these points are computed by projecting information to a background mesh and solving equations of motion on that mesh. Thus, the method preserves the meshfree description of the continuum while still utilizing efficiencies of mesh-based solution strategies.

There is increasing interest in the MPM as a means of modelling 2D and 3D continuum problems in which very large deformations occur, e.g. in the study of landslides and metal forming; or in which the geometry is complicated to mesh, e.g. in the study of porous media or polycrystals. The purpose of this minisymposium is to highlight this method to those unfamiliar with it. It is also intended as a forum for presenting advances in the method for practitioners, e.g. dealing with numerical issues, modelling of coupled problems, computational efficiency, and applications to real world problems.