Deformation and failure with the dual-domain material point method

Paul L Barclay, Jiajia Waters, Duan Z Zhang

Keywords: large deformation, brittle failure

TL;DR: The dual-domain material point method exhibits failure modes that are independent of mesh orientation.

Abstract: Simulations of large deformation are studied using the material point method (MPM) and the dual-domain material point (DDMP) method. If there are a sufficient number of material points per computational cell and if the deformation is small (i.e. there are few or no cell-crossing instances), the numerical error decreases with the cell size squared. For large deformations with many cell crossing events, DDMP has reduced error compared to MPM due to the continuous nature of the gradient of DDMP’s shape functions. Brittle failure simulations are also studied using MPM and DDMP where the background mesh is both aligned and misaligned to the expected failure plane. MPM exhibits significant mesh orientation dependent failure modes, while DDMP shows negligible dependency on mesh orientation. Therefore DDMP is a suitable candidate to be used for predicting brittle failure in complex geometries where it is difficult to know beforehand where the material will fail.