Theory and Simulation of Heterogeneous Materials in Dynamic Environments

The increased use of engineered materials for a variety of applications has placed increasing demands on theoretical and simulation results to understand their behavior in a wide range of environments, including dynamic environments. Many engineered materials with complex microstructures are heterogeneous on a scale that is difficult to ignore at the continuum scale. On the microstructural scale, the material behavior of different constituents, contact between constituents, and the effect of the local state of the constituents must be considered to accurately model the response of engineered materials. One place where this is particularly true is in the weak shock regime between low-stress/low-temperature behavior of materials, described by constitutive models, and thermomechanical shock, described by equation of state models.

For heterogeneous materials the first step toward understanding and modeling the behavior of these materials is to obtain experimental data. For equation of state models, which are needed to model both mechanical and thermal shocks to solids, this is usually done through gas-gun experiments. This talk will cover modeling and simulation of experiments, including mesoscale modeling, and averaging techniques that are used to develop continuum models. In addition, an alternative to traditional EOS/strength models for solids will be presented that doesn’t rely on an isotropic bulk/shear split of the material response.