A virtual test facility for the efficient simulation of solid material response under strong shock and detonation wave loading

A virtual test facility (VTF) for studying the three-dimensional dynamic response of solid materials subject to strong shock and detonation waves has been constructed as part of the research program of the Center for Simulating the Dynamic Response of Materials at the California Institute of Technology. The compressible fluid flow is simulated with a Cartesian finite volume method and treating the solid as an embedded moving body, while a Lagrangian finite element scheme is employed to describe the structural response to the hydrodynamic pressure loading. A temporal splitting method is applied to update the position and velocity of the boundary between time steps. The boundary is represented implicitly in the fluid solver with a level set function that is constructed on-the-fly from the unstructured solid surface mesh. Block-structured mesh adaptation with time step refinement in the fluid allows for the efficient consideration of disparate fluid and solid time scales. We detail the design of the employed object-oriented mesh refinement framework AMROC and outline its effective extension for fluid–structure interaction problems. Further, we describe the parallelization of the most important algorithmic components for distributed memory machines and discuss the applied partitioning strategies. As computational examples for typical VTF applications, we present the dynamic deformation of a tantalum cylinder due to the detonation of an interior solid explosive and the impact of an explosion-induced shock wave on a multi-material soft tissue body.