Waterjet penetration simulation by hybrid code of SPH and FEA

The creativity of this work is combining finite element analysis (FEA) and smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) methods to simulate the waterjet (WJ) penetration process. In WJ penetration, the waterjet undergoing extremely large deformation will introduce the distortion of mesh in FEA. To overcome this difficulty, the coupled method of SPH and FEA was developed, in which the waterjet was modeled by SPH particles and the target material was modeled by finite elements. The two parts interacted by contact algorithm of “nodes-to-surface”. Utilizing this hybrid model, waterjet with high velocity penetrating the target materials was calculated and the mechanism of erosion was depicted. The computation result gives the relationship between the jet velocity and the erosion capacity, including the depth of penetration and mass removal, which was compared with the experimental data.