Numerical studies on high-velocity impact welding: smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE)

The manufacturing industry often relies on numerical simulations to reduce the number of trial-and-error iterations required during the process development to reduce costs. However, this can be difficult in high strain rate manufacturing processes. For instance, in high-velocity impact welding, extremely high plastic strain regions develop. Thus, a traditional pure Lagrangian analysis is not able to accurately model the process due to excessive element distortion near the contact zone. In this paper, numerical simulations were conducted using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) methods to investigate a high-velocity oblique impact between two metal plates. While the preliminary results show that the two methods were capable of modeling the process, a trade-off between the computational cost and full prediction of the critical process parameters should be considered for industrial applications.