A virtual test facility for simulating the dynamic response of materials

The goal of the Caltech Center is to construct a virtual test facility (VTF): a problem solving environment for full 3D parallel simulation of the dynamic response of materials undergoing compression due to shock waves. The objective is to design a software environment that will: facilitate computation in a variety of experiments in which strong shock waves impinge on targets comprising various combinations of materials; compute the target materials' subsequent dynamic response; and validate these computations against experimental data. Successfully constructing such a facility requires modeling of the highest accuracy. We must model at atomistic scales to correctly describe the material properties of the target materials and high explosives; at intermediate (meso) scales to understand the micromechanical response of the target materials; and at continuum scales to capture properly the evolution of macroscopic effects. The article outlines such a test facility. Although it is a very simplified version of the facilities found in a shock-compression laboratory, our VTF includes all the basic features, offering a problem solving environment for validating experiments and facilitating further development of simulation capabilities.