Comparative study of the impact resistance of thin structures

We present a comparative study of different computational methods with respect their ability to predict the impact resistance of thin structures. The focus will be on meshless methods and smoothed finite method (SFEM). SFEM emerged from meshless methods and promises to inherit their effectivity in modeling large deformations while maintaining the computational efficiency of finite elements. The methods are applied to perforation and penetration experiments. Particularly for perforation experiments we show that the residual velocity of the impactor is predicted independent of the discretization in meshless methods while the results of smoothed finite element method depend on the mesh size.