Predicting dynamic fracture in viscoplastic materials using Taylor-SPH

• Taylor-SPH (TSPH) is a new meshfree method suitable to solve dynamic problems.
• TSPH method is suitable to predict dynamic fracture in viscoplastic materials.
• TSPH minimizes numerical dispersion and diffusion when dealing with shock waves.
• The proposed method (TSPH) is able to capture dynamic shear bands accurately.
• The obtained results are compared to those obtained with the FEM.

In viscoplastic materials strain localization always occurs before failure. Being able to capture the shear band is of paramount importance in order to model the failure and subsequent fracture of the material. If the failure of the material is produced by an impact the problem is more complicated since usually shock waves are involved in the process. In addition, modelling of shock waves propagation in solids presents major difficulties since even in the linear range the short wavelengths are subjected to numerical diffusion and dispersion. The recently developed Taylor-SPH (TSPH) is a meshfree method suitable to solve these problems since it minimizes numerical dispersion and diffusion when dealing with shock waves propagation. TSPH is able to capture shear bands accurately and it avoids the classical tensile instability. In order to validate the proposed method, a set of numerical simulations has been carried out using TSPH and the results are compared to those obtained with the Finite Element Method (FEM). Results show that the TSPH method is an accurate tool to capture dynamic shear bands and therefore can be used to model failure of materials under dynamic conditions. The method is shown to be stable, robust and only a reduced number of particles is required to obtain accurate results.