Delayed mesh relaxation for multi-material ALE formulation

• We apply the delayed mesh relaxation technique to model airblast problems.
• We validate this technique applied to multi-material ALE to predict shock wave propagation.
• We study the influence of the relaxation delay parameter on the computational results.

Multi-Material Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) finite element methods can solve large deformations in fast dynamic problems like explosions because the mesh motion can be independent of the material motion. However materials must flow between elements and this advection involves numerical dissipations. The rezoning mesh method presented in this paper was designed to reduce these numerical errors for shock wave propagation. The mesh moves to refine the elements near the shock front. This refinement limits the advection fluxes and so the numerical diffusion. This technique is applied to the numerical simulations of airblast problems for which a parameter controlling the mesh refinement is studied.