Computational explosion mechanics and related progress

Abstract

Explosion mechanics is the theoretical basis for the design of highly efficient arms and ammunition and industrial explosion safety. Because it involves the complex physical and mechanical behaviors of multi-materials under extreme conditions, such as high speed, high temperature and high pressure, it is almost impossible to give exact solutions for explosion problems. As explosion occurs in a very short time and has a strong destructive effect, there will be lim- ited amounts of experimental data obtained during the ex- plosion process. With the continuous development of numerical methods and computer performance, computational explosion mechanics has become a new interdisciplinary branch of explosion mechanics, material dynamics, compu- tational mathematics and computer technology, and greatly promoted the development of explosion mechanics and weapons equipment. Since the late 1960s, US-led western developed countries have developed more than one hundred calculation codes of explosion mechanics. Based on the simulation software for explosion mechanics, calculations about three-dimensional physical processes on a system scale during the course of weapon system development have been performed, which resulted in the development of a number of high efficiency arms and ammunition. Such research institutions as the Beijing Institute of Technology, the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, the University of Science and Technology of China and other research institutions have developed different numerical methods for explosion mechanics, dynamic constitutive models and software development. Finite Difference Method and Finite Element Method are the most common methods of the discrete methods adopted in computational explosion mechanics. The former is a representative method by which time and space are covered with cells to gain approximate numerical solutions after partial differential equations (governing equations) are established. The latter is a representative method by which continuous space is decomposed into finite elements. Classed by coordinates, Eulerian method and Lagrangrian Method are two common methods utilized in computational explosion mechanics.