Material point method and application to impact and penetration

Being a fully Lagrangian particle method, the material point method (MPM) discretizes a material domain using a collection of material points. To illustrate the capability of MPM in the simulations of hypervelocity impact, the impact of a spherical lead projectile with a velocity of 6.58 km/s on a thin lead plate is examined. The MPM simulations of the bullet-speed penetration problems are still challenging tasks due to the stick contact condition included in the standard MPM. The contact MPM algorithm for penetration simulation is developed. Different MPM algorithms solve a penetration problem with an impact velocity 575 m /s. The calculations show the projectile's residual velocities computed by the contact MPM algorithm are closest to the experimental results.