Numerical procedures for extreme impulsive loading on high strength concrete structures

This paper demonstrates numerical techniques for complex large-scale modeling with microplane constitutive theories for reinforced high strength concrete, which for these applications, is defined to be around the 7000 psi (48 MPa) strength as frequently found in protective structural design. Applications involve highly impulsive loads, such as an explosive detonation or impact-penetration event. These capabilities were implemented into the authors' finite element code, ParaAble and the PRONTO 3D code from Sandia National Laboratories. All materials are explicitly modeled with eight-noded hexahedral elements. The concrete is modeled with a microplane constitutive theory, the reinforcing steel is modeled with the Johnson-Cook model, and the high explosive material is modeled with a JWL equation of state and a programmed burn model. Damage evolution, which can be used for erosion of elements and/or for post-analysis examination of damage, is extracted from the microplane predictions and computed by a modified Holmquist-Johnson-Cook approach that relates damage to levels of inelastic strain increment and pressure. Computation is performed with MPI on parallel processors. Several practical analyses demonstrate that large-scale analyses of this type can be reasonably run on large parallel computing systems.