Simplified Models of Fracture and Fragmentation

Abstract

Current engineering models of fracture and fragmentation usually rely almost exclusively on analytical fits to empirical “field data,” so it is necessary to generate a new data set for each new application. We will not discuss such models here, even though they have proven very useful in the weapons effects community. Instead, we will concentrate on emerging physics-based models that, at least to some degree, describe the nucleation of damage at weak spots in the material, the growth of the damage with associated material softening, and the ultimate coalescence of the damage to form a fragment size and velocity distribution. The input to such models is based on material properties measured in the laboratory, and the models therefore hold the promise of being much less dependent on expensive (and sometimes unobtainable) field data than are the current engineering models.