BILLION-SIZE SIMULATION OF THE IMPACT RESPONSE OF CERAMIC PLATES ON DOD SUPERCOMPUTERS

A. Seagraves, M. Tupek, R. Radovitzky* Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139

ABSTRACT
Ceramic materials play a central role in developing eective armor protection systems for the warghter. With a view towards designing more eective armor systems the impact response of ceramics has been extensively studied through post-mortem experimental analysis of impacted specimens, providing insight into the operative failure modes (e.g. concial and radial cracks and intragranular plasticity) and the dependence of nal damage patterns on problem parameters such as penetrator speed and specimen geometry. However, details on the temporal evolution of internal damage are largely inaccessible to the experimentalist, leaving many important questions unanswered. For example, what are the physical mechanisms which control the prevalance of different failure modes as a function of specimen geometry and penetrator speed, and how do dierent failure modes contribute to energy dissipation in armor ceramics? In this study, we take a step towards answering these questions through large-scale parallel simulation of a model ceramic plate impact problem using a combined discontinuous Galerkin (DG), cohesive zone model (CZM) approach introduced recently by Radovitzky and coworkers Seagraves and Radovitzky (2009); Radovitzky et al. (In press, 2010). The threedimensional calculations presented herein illustrate the ability of this new approach to capture the basic features of the unconned impact response of ceramics including the formation of a communited zone and conical, radial, and lateral cracking patterns. In addition, the eects of penetrator velocity are examined through a parametric study which captures the following trends with increasing impact velocity: An increase in the number of radial cracks and the size of the damage cone and a greater extent of comminution/fragmentation with increasing impact velocity.

1.

Introduction

The damage and failure of brittle materials subjected to intense loads is characterized by the development of intricate patterns of three-dimensional cracks, especially in the case of localized impact loading, e.g. Bowden and Field (1964); Evans and Wilshaw (1977); Evans et al. (1978). The computational characterization of these three-dimensional aspects of brittle 1

damage processes is critical in many applications including armor materials Prokurat Franks (2008) and orbital debris mitigation Council (1997). One class of approaches which has shown promise for modeling brittle fracture processes is based on the so-called discrete crack model of fracture. In the discrete crack approach, the initiation and propagation of cracks is modeled explicitly by introducing surfaces of discontinuity within the material. The fracture processes at these surfaces of discontinuity can be described by cohesive zone models (CZM) of fracture Barenblatt (1962); Dugdale (1960) via a phenomenological traction-separation law (TSL). The most popular implementation of this concept is the so-called cohesive element method (see Seagraves and Radovitzky (2009) for a recent review) in which crack openings are represented as displacement jumps at the inter-element boundaries using interface or cohesive nite elements Ortiz and Suresh (1993); Xu and Needleman (1994); Camacho and Ortiz (1996); Ortiz and Pandol (1999). Simulations using cohesive element methods suer from a well-known mesh dependency as the possible crack nucleation sites and propagation paths are constrained by the nite element discretization Xu and Needleman (1996); Xu et al. (1997); Ruiz et al. (2001); Zhang et al. (2007). This hinders the ability to describe complex crack patterns arising in three dimensional problems. A possible avenue for mitigating mesh dependency in cohesive element methods is to employ very ne meshes. As the mesh becomes ner, the available sites for crack nucleation and propagation increases, thus reducing crack path dependence on the mesh. Mesh renement is also critical for resolving the size of the fracture process zone which is exceedingly small in brittle materials. The need for highly rened meshes demands parallel computational schemes that are scalable to large numbers of processors for problems of increasing size, especially in three dimensional problems. This issue was recently addressed by Radovitzky and coworkers Seagraves and Radovitzky (2009); Radovitzky et al. (In press, 2010) who proposed a scalable computational approach for modeling dynamic fracture in three-dimensions which is based on the combination of a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) reformulation of the continuum problem Noels and Radovitzky (2006, 2007) and CZM of fracture.

In the new method, interface elements are inserted at interelement boundaries at the beginning of the simulation, which proceeds using a DG approach. Consistency and stability of the nite element solution in the pre-fracture regime are guaranteed by additional terms in the weak statement of the problem which emerge naturally from the DG formulation. When the specied fracture criterion is met at an interelement boundary, the computation of the DG interface ux terms gives its place to an extrinsic cohesive law which describes the irreversible traction-separation response eventually leading to complete decohesion and the formation of new crack surfaces. The numerical framework also provides a simple means for enforcing a contact constraint between adjacent crack surfaces at the interface element level in the case of crack closure in the post-fracture regime. This aspect of the method is particularly important in simulating the multi-hit impact response of protective structures (e.g. armor plates), as well as in other structures exhibiting progressive damage. The purpose of the present paper is two-fold. First, we report on the scalability of the parallel computational framework from Seagraves and Radovitzky (2009); Radovitzky et al. (In press, 2010) for large problem sizes and large numbers of processors. Then we apply the method to the problem of impact of an unconned ceramic plate with a rigid spherical projectile. The fracture response of the ceramic plate is investigated for three dierent impact velocities and in all cases, the numerical method captures the formation of a comminuted zone underneath the penetrator and conical and radial cracking patterns.

Resource Center which consists of 1100 compute nodes (4400 cores). Each compute node contains two Intel 3.0 GHz Woodcrest 64-bit dual-core processors with 8 Gb of memory each. The nodes are interconnected via a 4x DDR Inniband network1 . The Diamond system which is and SGI Altix ICE consisting of 1,920 compute nodes (15,360 compute cores). Each compute node contains two 2.8GHz Intel Xeon 64bit quadcore Nehalem processors with 24 Gb of memory. The nodes are interconnected in a HyperCube topology DDR 4X InniBand network2 . A nite element mesh comprising 50,732 volume elements (507,320 nodes) is employed iniitially on 2 processors. Then, both the number of processors and the computational mesh are increased so as to maintain a xed computational load per processor. The largest simulation was conducted on 4096 processors on the Diamond system and consisted of 103 million elements or 1.03 billion nodes. The results are summarized in Figure 1, which shows a plot of the CPU time normalized with the number of elements and number of time steps as a function of the number of cores used for each platform considered. The plot shows that the DG/CZM method maintains excellent scalability at least up to 4096 processors. These results are consistent with the scalability of the continuum DG framework for explicit dynamic calculations of large deformation of solids presented in Noels and Radovitzky (2007). However, the new results not only include the extended framework for dynamic fracture but are also for very large problems (up to 3 billion degrees of freedom) and processor counts (up to 4096). Thus, the scalability of the proposed DG/CZM method for large parallel computations of fracture and fragmentation is demonstrated.

2.

Scalability Tests

The scalability of the proposed DG/CZM method is assessed using simulations of uniaxial wave propagation and spall in an elastic bar (see Radovitzky et al. (In press, 2010) for more information on the simulation details). The simulations are conducted on three dierent platforms: our group cluster, and two supercomputers at the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). The platform details are: Our group cluster which consists of 40 compute nodes (320 compute cores). Each compute node contains two Intel 2.26 GHz Xeon E5520 64-bit quad-core processors with 24Gb of memory. The nodes are interconnected via a 4x DDR Inniband network. The MJM system at the DoD Supercomputing
1 More 2 More

3.

Ceramic Plate Impact

Ceramics are commonly employed in the design of protective armor plates in defense applications due to their high ballistic impact resistance. The pioneering paper of Shockey et al Shockey et al. (1990) showed that impact response of ceramic plates exhibits a complex combination of failure modes including radial, conical and lateral cracks, as well as lattice plasticity. The computational modeling of this complex problem using CZM was rst attempted by Camacho and Ortiz Camacho and Ortiz (1996). They showed that the extrinsic CZM was successful at capturing the conical crack patterns in ceramic plate impact providing

information available at http://www.arl.hpc.mil/Systems/mjm.html information available at http://www.erdc.hpc.mil/hardSoft/Hardware/ICE

Figure 1: Scalability of the DG/CZM method on up to 4096 processors and problems of upward of 3 billion degrees of freedom: Scaled speed-up results given as compute time per time step and per element as a function of number of processors for all three platforms tested

Rigid Sphere radius r s velocity Vs

L/2 L/2

Alumina Plate

t L

Figure 2: A schematic of the simulation setup for the impact simulation.

nely resolved meshes were employed in the calculations. However, due to the axisymmetric assumption which enabled the calculations to be conducted in a two-dimensional domain, the radial cracks could not be modeled explicitly via the CZM. Instead, they adopted a continuum damage approach only for this purpose. Here, we revisit this problem and attempt a full three-dimensional description of the ceramic plate impact problem using the DG/CZM proposed. We emphasize that three dimensional calculations with the resolution required to capture all the crack patterns in this problem is enabled by the scalability of the approach, which, in turn, relies on the possibility of seamlessly propagating cracks across processor boundaries. We consider the model problem of impact of rigid sphere at the center of a square alumina plate depicted schematically in Figure 2. The plate and sphere dimensions and the range of impact velocities considered are given in table 3.. It is assumed that the plate behaves elastically until the onset of fracture with the material properties for the bulk elements of the plate listed in table 3.. Properties Plate Length Thickness Initial density Elastic Modulus Poissons Ratio Radius Density Velocity L = 5.08 cm t = 1.2 cm 0 = 3810 kgm3 E = 400 GPa = 0.21 Sphere rs = 3.8 mm s = 7800 kgm3 Vs = 500, 750, 1000 ms1 Values

Table 2: Cohesive law parameters used in the ceramic impact simulation The results of the impact simulations are shown in Figures 3-5 which show a slice of the deformed ceramic plate near the back face (top image) and a slice through the cross section at the center of the plate (bottom image). The images in Figures 3-5 clearly show the trace of radial cracking patterns on the back face and the trace of conical cracking patterns in the cross section. The cross section images in Figures 3 and 5 also demonstrate the formation of a comminuted zone of fragmented material directly under the penetrator which is being ejected up and away from the plate following the rebound of the spherical penetrator. The simulation results also reveal the following general trends for increasing impact velocity: The number of radial cracks increases The angle of the damage cone increases The extent of fragmentation/comminution increases We nally show in Figure 6 a view of the back face in the deformed conguration at the end of the simulation with the dierent mesh partitions in different colors. The purpose of this gure is to demonstrate that in the parallel DG/CZM method proposed, cracks are able to propagate freely across the processor boundaries without the need of communicating any topological information between the processors.

4.

Conclusions

Table 1: Plate and sphere dimensions and material properties used for the ceramic impact simulation. Prior to fracture, the interface elements at the interelement boundaries respond according to the continuum DG formulation as detailed in Seagraves and Radovitzky (2009); Radovitzky et al. (In press, 2010). Upon the onset of fracture, the cohesive law with the properties in table 3. becomes operative at the quadrature points of the interface elements.. The nite element mesh employed in the calculation consists of 134,572 volumetric nite elements or 1,345,720 nodes.
Properties DG Stability Parameter Critical Cohesive Strength Work of Separation Critical Opening Displacement Tension/Shear Weighting Parameter Values s = 4.0 c = 1.4 GPa s = 25.4 Jm2 c = 36 nm = 0.0

In this paper, a scalable 3D computational method was employed for modeling dynamic fracture and fragmentation of brittle solids. The method is based on a combination of a discontinuous Galerkin formulation of the continuum problem and Cohesive Zone Models of fracture. The approach is general in the sense that it does not place any restriction on the TSL employed in the description of fracture. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of the DG/CZM formulation applied in this work is its straightforward parallel implementation which does not require the communication of topological mesh changes as cracks propagate across processor boundaries. This enables large-scale simulations with highly rened meshes which is critical for describing complex crack patterns and fragmentation in three-dimensions. The excellent scalability properties of the parallel implementation were demonstrated on three dierent platforms on up to 4096 processors and problem sizes of up to three billion degrees of freedom. The method was then applied to the problem of 4

Figure 3: Final fracture patterns on the back face and in the cross section for an impact velocity of 500 m/s

Figure 4: Final fracture patterns on the back face and in the cross section for an impact velocity of 750 m/s

Figure 5: Final fracture patterns on the back face and in the cross section for an impact velocity of 1000 m/s

Figure 6: Final fracture pattern for an impact velocity of 1000 m/s showing crack propagation across the mesh partitions

impact of a ceramic plate and captured the main patterns of conical and radial cracks for three dierent impact velocities which propagate in the mesh impassive to the presence of processor boundaries.

Ortiz, M. and A. Pandol, 1999: Finite-deformation irreversible cohesive elements for three-dimensional crack-propagation analysis. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 44, 1267 1282. 1. Ortiz, M. and S. Suresh, 1993: Statistical properties residual stresses and intergranular fracture in ceramic materials. Journal of Applied Mechanics, 60, 7784. 1. Prokurat Franks, L., (Ed.), 2008: Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference and Exposition on Advanced Ceramics & Composites, The American Ceramics Society, Wiley, Daytone Beach, FL. 1. Radovitzky, R., A. Seagraves, M. Tupek, and L. Noels, In press, 2010: A scalable 3d fracture and fragmentation algorithm based on a hybrid, discontinuous galerkin, cohesive element method. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering. (document), 1., 2., 3. Ruiz, G., A. Pandol, and M. Ortiz, 2001: Threedimensional cohesive modeling of dynamic mixedmode fracture. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 52 (1-2), 97120. 1. Seagraves, A. and R. Radovitzky, 2009: Dynamic Failure of Materials and Structures, chap. 12 Advances in Cohesive Zone Modeling of Dynamic Fracture, 349405. Springer. (document), 1., 3. Shockey, D. A., A. Marchand, S. Skaggs, G. Cort, M. Burkett, and R. Parker, 1990: Failure phenomenology of conned ceramic targets and impacting rods. International Journal of Impact Engineering, 9 (3), 263275. 3. Xu, X. and A. Needleman, 1994: Numerical simulation of fast crack growth in brittle solids. Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, 42 (9), 1397 1434. 1. Xu, X. and A. Needleman, 1996: Numerical simulations of dynamic crack growth along an interface. International Journal of Fracture, 74, 289324. 1. Xu, X., A. Needleman, and F. Abraham, 1997: Eect of inhomogeneities on dynamic crack growth in an elastic solid. Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering, 5, 489516. 1. Zhang, Z., G. Paulino, and W. Celes, 2007: Extrinsic cohesive modeling of dynamic fracture and microbranching instability in brittle materials. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 72, 893923. 1. 7

5.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the support of this research from the Oce of Naval Research under grant N0001407-1-0764 and from the U.S. Army Research Oce through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, under Contract DAAD-19-02-D-0002.

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