Numerical Modelling of Fracture in Particulate Composites using SPH Method

In recent years, the research and development of composites have received more attention due to rapid increase in demand for composites in various applications. The particulate composites have been used in many fields, for example, to produce functionally graded materials which are potential solutions to biomedical and other modern engineering applications. Many analytical and numerical methods have been developed to evaluate the effective properties and the failure characteristics of composites. However, the SPH method can be effectively applied to model particulate composites by exploiting the advantages of its meshless nature and the ability to model large deformation with fracture. In this paper, the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics method is applied to simulate the mechanical properties and fracture process of the particulate composites. The main emphasis is on applying SPH technique to particulate composites and developing a model and related numerical tools for such application. The mechanical properties of the composite material are calculated and the failure process under tensile loading is simulated. The configurations of damaged material during the failure process are analyzed. This paper presents the formulation of numerical model based on corrected SPH method, with number of results to illustrate the effectiveness of the methodology. The results demonstrate that the SPH method can be effectively used to the composite materials with more than one type of material and sub-regions.