ACCURATE LAND MINE MODELING USING FEM & SPH WITH MODIFIED SMOOTHING LENGTH

Accurate land mine modeling has been the subject of substantial research over the past 15 years. Many methods have been investigated using various computational codes, and LS-DYNA remains a popular choice because of its capabilities for modeling full armored vehicles. Prior research discloses a range of strategies that have been utilized, including various numerical methods such as FEM, ALE, SPH, and DEM. This paper discusses a hybrid FEM-SPH land mine modeling approach using LS-DYNA that provides high accuracy at reasonable computational expense. While stable and phenomenologically correct, accuracy issues persisted with this approach, which tended to produce the typical SPH under-prediction of impulse. However, adjusting two key parameters– smoothing length and coefficient of restitution– were found to resolve the impulse under-prediction. The final land mine modeling strategy provided an accurate all-Lagrangian approach for application to full-scale vehicle models in LS-DYNA, whose predictive accuracy rivals that of the ALE.