Numerical modeling of hypervelocity impacts on carbon fiber reinforced plastics using a GPU-accelerated SPH model.

Hypervelocity impact (HVI) on carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRPs) is associated with extreme impulse response of material as well as complex characteristics of the composites. It is a challenging task to predict the physical process of CFRP-HVI problems accurately. We apply a GPU-accelerated smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method which incorporates the composite material model and the decoupled finite particle method to simulate the CFRP-HVI processes. The presented SPH model is validated by simulating the processes of aluminum spheres impacting metallic plates. The simulation results agree well with available experimental and numerical results, and the GPU parallelization technique significantly improves the simulation efficiency (350 times faster than an equivalent serial SPH model). With such computational accuracy and efficiency, the model is extended to simulate CFRP laminate impact problems, and a particle convergence analysis is performed. It is shown that the model can obtain convergent results when modeling each CFRP layer with three SPH particles in the thickness direction and correspondingly using about twenty million particles in total. The simulation can be completed within several hours, and the dominant mechanisms of the CFRP-HVI can be captured quantitatively. To further investigate the protective performance of CFRP structures, HVI on a well-known shielding structure Whipple bumper is investigated numerically. The dynamic response of the structure is well reproduced, and the results show that the CFRP pressure wall is more effective than the metallic one. These simulation results demonstrate that the presented SPH model can model the CFRP-HVI problems accurately and efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]