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Contact and fracture in the material point method require grid-scale enrichment or partitioning of material into distinct velocity fields to allow for displacement or velocity discontinuities at a material interface. A new method is presented in which a kernel-based damage field is constructed from the particle data. The gradient of this field is used to dynamically repartition the material into contact pairs at each node. This approach avoids the need to construct and evolve explicit cracks or contact surfaces and is therefore well suited to problems involving complex 3-D fracture with crack branching and coalescence. A straightforward extension of this approach permits frictional 'self-contact' between surfaces that are initially part of a single velocity field, enabling more accurate simulation of granular flow, porous compaction, fragmentation, and comminution of brittle materials. Numerical simulations of self contact and dynamic crack propagation are presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the approach.

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Shockwave data on mineral‐forming compounds such as Mg2SiO4 are essential for understanding the interiors of Earth and other planets, but correct interpretation of these data depends on knowing the phase assemblage being probed at high pressure. Hence, direct observations of the phase or phases making up the measured states along the forsterite Hugoniot are essential to assess whether kinetic factors inhibit the achievement of the expected equilibrium, phase‐separated assemblage. Previous shock recovery experiments on forsterite, which has orthorhombic space group Pbnm, show discrepant results as to whether forsterite undergoes segregation into its equilibrium phase assemblage of compositionally distinct structures upon shock compression. Here we present the results of plate impact experiments on polycrystalline forsterite conducted at the Dynamic Compression Sector of the Advanced Photon Source. In situ X‐ray diffraction measurements were used to probe the crystal structure(s) in the shock state and to investigate potential decomposition into periclase and bridgmanite. In contrast to previous interpretations of the forsterite shock Hugoniot, we find that forsterite does not decompose but instead reaches the forsterite III structure, which is a metastable structure of Mg2SiO4 with orthorhombic space group Cmc21.