Field-gradient partitioning for fracture and frictional contact in the material point method

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. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.