Treatment of contact separation in Eulerian high‐speed multimaterial dynamic simulations

A frictionless contact separation treatment in a sharp‐interface Eulerian framework is presented to handle the general situation of high‐speed impact and separation of materials. The algorithm has been developed for an established Eulerian‐based Cartesian grid multimaterial flow code in which the interfaces are tracked in a sharp manner using a standard narrow‐band level set approach. Boundary conditions have been applied using a modified ghost fluid method for elasto‐plastic materials. The sharp‐interface treatment maintains the distinct interacting interfaces without smearing the contact zone while also removing the difficulties associated with Lagrangian moving mesh entities in contact‐separation situations. The algorithm has been tested and verified against experimental and numerical results for three different problems in the high strain rate regime, which involve contact, separation and sliding of materials. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.