Numerical modeling of effect of polyurea on response of steel plates to impulsive loads in direct pressure-pulse experiments

0167-6636/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd doi:10.1016/j.mechmat.2009.09.009 * Corresponding author. Address: University of Ca Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, 4909 Eng 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0416, USA. T E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Nemat-Nasser). Results of computationalmodeling and simulation of the response ofmonolithicDH-36 steel plates and bilayer steel-polyurea plates to impulsive loads in direct pressure-pulse experiments (Amini et al., in press-b), are presented anddiscussed. The corresponding experiments and their results are presented in an accompanying paper (Amini et al., 2010). The entire experimental setup is modeled using the finite-element code, LS-DYNA, in which a physics-based temperatureand strain rate-sensitive constitutive model for DH-36 steel, developed by Nemat-Nasser and Guo (2003b) and an experimentally supported temperature-, rate-, and pressure-sensitive constitutive model for polyurea, developed and incorporated into the computer code, LS-DYNA, by Amirkhizi et al. (2006), have been implemented. The transient response of the plates under impulsive pressure loads is studied, focusing on the effects of the relative position of polyureawith respect to the loading direction, the thickness of the polyurea layer, and the polyurea-steel interface bonding strength. The numerical simulations of the entire experiment support the experimentally observed results reported by Amini et al. (2010). 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.