Extraction of Fragments and Waves After Impact Damage in Particle-Based Simulations

The analysis of simulation results and the verification against experimental data is essential to develop and interpret simulation models for impact damage. We present two visualization techniques to post-process particle-based simulation data, and we highlight new aspects for the quantitative comparison with experimental data. As the underlying simulation model we consider the particle method Peridynamics, a non-local generalization of continuum mechanics. The first analysis technique is an extended component labeling algorithm to extract the fragment size and the corresponding histograms. The distribution of the fragment size can be obtained by real-world experiments as demonstrated in Schram and Meyer (Simulating the formation and evolution of behind armor debris fields. ARL-RP 109, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, 2005), Vogler et al. (Int J Impact Eng 29:735–746, 2003). The second approach focuses on the visualization of the stress after an impact. Here, the particle-based data is re-sampled and rendered with standard volume rendering techniques to address the interference pattern of the stress wave after reflection at the boundary. For the extraction and visual analysis, we used the widely-used Stanford bunny as a complex geometry. For a quantitative study with a simple geometry, the edge-on impact experiment (Schradin, Scripts German Acad Aeronaut Res 40:21–68, 1939; Strassburger, Int J Appl Ceram Technol 1:1:235–242, 2004; Kawai et al., Procedia Eng 103:287–293, 2015) can be applied. With these new visualization approaches, new insights for the quantitative comparison of fragmentation and wave propagation become intuitively accessible.