Modeling material responses by arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian formulation and adaptive mesh refinement method

In this paper we report an efficient numerical method combining a staggered arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) formulation with the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) method for materials modeling including elastic-plastic flows, material failure, and fragmentation predictions. Unlike traditional AMR applied on fixed domains, our investigation focuses on the application to moving and deforming meshes resulting from Lagrangian motion. We give details of this numerical method with a capability to simulate elastic-plastic flows and predict material failure and fragmentation, and our main focus of this paper is to create an efficient method which combines ALE and AMR methods to simulate the dynamics of material responses with deformation and failure mechanisms. The interlevel operators and boundary conditions for these problems in AMR meshes have been investigated, and error indicators to locate material deformation and failure regions are studied. The method has been applied on several test problems, and the solutions of the problems obtained with the ALE-AMR method are reported. Parallel performance and software design for the ALE-AMR method are also discussed. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.