Numerical Analysis of Lightweight Materials and their Combinations to Understand their Behaviour against High Pressure Shock Loading

Abstract

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Materials play a key role in our day to day life and have shaped the industrial revolution to a great extent. Right selection of material for meeting a particular objective is the key to success in today’s world where the cost as well as sustainability of any equipment or a system have assumed greater significance than ever before. In automotive industry, materials have a definitive role as far as the mobility and safety is concerned. Materials that can absorb the required energy or impact can be manufactured through different manufacturing as well as metallurgical processes which involves appropriate heat treatment and bringing correct chemical compositions etc. However, they can also be formed by simpler methods such as combining certain materials together in the form of layered combinations to form light weight composites. Analyzing the response of different materials during incidents such as high-speed impact or transmission of shock waves as a result of earthquakes, tsunami or manmade disasters like explosion, is of great importance. Those materials which can respond in a desirable manner to meet a particular requirement during the most undesirable conditions such as high energy impacts can be termed as high energy absorbing materials and they play a crucial role in designing important structures, frames, protective vehicles and equipments, sacrificial components and claddings etc. These materials and structures need to be tested for their strength and design against adverse loading conditions. In this paper, different materials like steel, aluminum and aluminum-rubber combination are analyzed to understand their response during high pressure loading incidences. Judicious and scientific application of these materials can ensure a much better protection to different structures of importance, buildings as well as in defence, aerospace and automotive related applications. There are different methods of analyzing the strength and capabilities of materials or their combinations such as experimental, lab and simulation method. Out of these, the simulation (numerical analysis) method is one of the most appropriate methods which give very accurate results as compared to other methods. Here, Ansys- Autodyn simulation is used to draw the analysis of the materials and their combinations under high pressure shock loadings, resulting due to explosion or blast, and the total energy, pressure, displacement and velocity parameters are studied and compared.</div></div>