ABSTRACT
The question of how damage progresses in time and how materials fail when impacted by a projectile is an important one. Understanding this progression can help with improving design of material systems and structures like safety windows, protective shields and armor, and even screens of mobile devices like cell phones. These types of problems have been difficult to model in the past, and to our knowledge, no model can accurately describe the entire evolution of damage, from the initiation stages to the post-fracture and fragmentation phase. More often than not, to even obtain some partial solutions to the problem of predicting brittle damage from impact, one has to “insert” parts of solution into the model, by ways of, for example, criteria for failure, etc., that might work for crack initiation but might not work well when the process leads to fragmentation, etc. The aim of the peridynamic model is to rely on a simple, basic damage mechanism and be able to encompass a variety of failure modes from fine cracks, to fragmentation, and anything in-between.
