Mesoscale numerical modeling of plastic bonded explosives under shock loading

Mesoscale responses of plastic bonded explosives under shock loading are investigated using material point method as implemented in the Unitah Computational Framework. The two-dimensional geometrical model which can approximately reflect the mesoscopic structure of plastic bonded explosives was created based on the Voronoi tessellation. Shock loading for the explosive was performed by a piston moving at a constant velocity. For the purpose of investigating the influence of shock strength on the responses of explosives, two different velocities for the piston were used, 200 m/s and 400 m/s, respectively. The simulation results indicate that under shock loading there forms some stress localizations on the grain boundary of explosive. These stress localizations lead to large plastic deformations, and the plastic strain energy transforms to thermal energy immediately, causing temperature to rise rapidly and form some hot spots on grain boundary areas. The comparison between two different piston velocities shows that with increasing shock strength, the distribution of plastic strain and temperature does not have significant change, but their values increase obviously. Namely, the higher the shock strength is, the higher the hot spot temperature will be.