NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS OF BLAST-IMPACT PROBLEMS USING THE DIRECT SIMULATION MONTE CARLO METHOD
Open Access
- Author:
- Sharma, Anupam
- Graduate Program:
- Aerospace Engineering
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 05, 2004
- Committee Members:
- Lyle Norman Long, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Philip John Morris, Committee Member
Dr Paul E Plassmann, Committee Member
James Bernhard Anderson, Committee Member
Dr Andrea J Schokker, Committee Member - Keywords:
- shock
blast
DSMC
Blast-impact
parallel programming
OOP - Abstract:
- There is an increasing need to design protective structures that can withstand or mitigate the impulsive loading due to the impact of a blast or a shock wave. A preliminary step in designing such structures is the prediction of the pressure loading on the structure. This is called the ``load definition.' This thesis is focused on a numerical approach to predict the load definition on arbitrary geometries for a given strength of the incident blast/shock wave. A particle approach, namely the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method, is used as the numerical model. A three-dimensional, time-accurate DSMC flow solver is developed as a part of this study. Embedded surfaces, modeled as triangulations, are used to represent arbitrary-shaped structures. Several techniques to improve the computational efficiency of the algorithm of particle-structure interaction are presented. The code is designed using the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm. Domain decomposition with message passing is used to solve large problems in parallel. The solver is extensively validated against analytical results and against experiments. Two kinds of geometries, a box and an I-shaped beam are investigated for blast impact. These simulations are performed in both two- and three-dimensions. A major portion of the thesis is dedicated to studying the uncoupled fluid dynamics problem where the structure is assumed to remain stationary and intact during the simulation. A coupled, fluid-structure dynamics problem is solved in one spatial dimension using a simple, spring-mass-damper system to model the dynamics of the structure. A parameteric study, by varying the mass, spring constant, and the damping coefficient, to study their effect on the loading and the displacement of the structure is also performed. Finally, the parallel performance of the solver is reported for three sample-size problems on two Beowulf clusters.