Parallel Numerical Simulation of 3D High-Speed Penetration Based on the SPH Method

Based on the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method, a parallel numerical simulation method was developed for projectile penetration into thin metal targets to address complex physical phenomena such as large deformation, damage, and fracture involved in high-velocity penetration. To accurately describe the material’s mechanical response under high-speed loading, a simplified Johnson-Cook damage model was adopted. To tackle the high computational cost caused by the rapid increase in particle numbers in SPH simulations, the computational domain was divided into subdomains, and an MPI-based CPU parallel solver was developed and implemented to exchange particle information between them. The accuracy of the numerical method in predicting residual velocity and the penetration process was validated by comparing the simulation results with experimental data from the literature. For the 8mm and 10mm thick target plates, the maximum prediction errors were 7.86% and 5.44%, respectively. A systematic evaluation of the parallel framework’s acceleration performance showed a significant improvement in computational efficiency. For a medium-scale problem involving approximately 1.79 million particles, a parallel speedup efficiency of 0.76 was achieved using 54 CPU cores. While ensuring simulation accuracy, this parallel SPH framework successfully extends the computational capability to a higher order of magnitude, enabling large-scale simulations with over 100 million particles.