Engineering Fracture Mechanics 71 (2004) 547–556

www.elsevier.com/locate/engfracmech

Numerical analysis of high speed concrete fragmentation

using a meshfree Lagrangian method
Timon Rabczuk *, Josef Eibl, Lothar Stempniewski
Institute of Concrete Structures and Building Materials, University of Karlsruhe, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany
Received 30 October 2002; accepted 5 November 2002

Abstract
The topic of this paper is the fragmentation of concrete due to explosive loading. A meshfree Lagrangian method
called smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is used in the numerical simulation. A macroscopic constitutive law for
concrete is implemented in the SPH-Code. It is shown that the SPH-method is able to simulate the damage of
concrete slabs under contact detonation. The numerical results are compared with the data from two tests. The good
agreement between them suggests that the SPH-program can predict the correct maximum pressures as well as the
damage of the concrete slabs. Finally the fragment distributions of the tests and the numerical calculations are
compared.
Ó 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The demolition of concrete structures is the subject of many research works since several years. Hereby
the fragmentation process of the disrupted structures is of interest. A major concern at a demolition by
blasting is the influence of the disrupted buildings on the environment. It is of interest to know how much
the neighbor buildings are affected by flying debris. A first step is a detailed investigation of the frag-
mentation process of concrete. To perform numerical studies on the fragmentation process of concrete a
meshfree Lagrangian method called smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) was chosen. Instead of finite
elements this method uses so called particles, interacting with each other via an interpolation function. Due
to its advantages of being Lagrangian and meshfree it is used to analyze high deformation events, failure
and fragmentation. Therefore a SPH-Code was developed and a constitutive law for concrete was imple-
mented. Finally it is possible to reproduce the evolution of damage and fragmentation of different concrete
slabs under contact detonation.

*
Corresponding author. Address: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University, 2145 N Sheridan, Evanston,
IL 60208-3111, USA. Tel.: +1-847-491-3046; fax: +1-847-491-391.
E-mail address: t-rabczuk@northwestern.edu (T. Rabczuk).

0013-7944/$ - see front matter Ó 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0013-7944(03)00032-8
548 T. Rabczuk et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 71 (2004) 547–556

2. The SPH-method

The SPH-method is a meshfree Lagrangian method to discretize structures or fluids. The value of a
function uðxÞ of a particle is calculated via a shape function U by the use of neighboring particles j as shown
in Eq. (2.1):
X
n
uh ðxÞ ¼ uj U j ð2:1Þ
j¼1

Here uh ðxÞ is an arbitrary function. In the standard SPH-procedure the shape function U is calculated via
the product of the particle volume and a kernel function W , which determines the influence of the particle
on its neighborhood:
Xn
uh ðxÞ ¼ uj W ðx  xj ; hÞmj =qj ð2:2Þ
j¼1

The requirements usually imposed on the kernel function are [15]:

1: lim W ðx  xj ; hÞ ¼ dðx  xj Þ ð2:3Þ
h!0

Z
2: W ðx  xj ; hÞ dXj ¼ 1 ð2:4Þ

3: W ðx  xj ; hÞ ¼ 0 8ðx  xj Þ > 2h ð2:5Þ

4: W ðx  xj ; hÞ ¼ W ðxj  x; hÞ ð2:6Þ

5: rW ðx  xj ; hÞ ¼ rW ðxj  x; hÞ ð2:7Þ

Various possibilities exist for choosing the kernel function W , see e.g. [8,10] or [6]. In Fig. 1 the cubic B-
spline (black line) and its first spatial derivative (gray line) is illustrated. It is the only kernel that provides
exact interpolation of constant and linear functions on a uniform mesh and is therefore used in this SPH-
Code.
The spatial derivatives of the function uðxÞ in the standard SPH-procedure are obtained by derivating the
weighting function W :

0.35
0.3
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
W W´

0
-0.05
-0.1
-0.15
-0.2
-0.25
-0.3
-0.35
-3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3
x

Fig. 1. Cubic B-spline with derivative.

 T. Rabczuk et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 71 (2004) 547–556 549
X
ruh ¼  uj rW ðx  xj ; hÞmj =qj ð2:8Þ
j

Because the derivative is considered at particle xj instead of at x, there is a minus sign on the right hand side
of Eq. (2.8).
One drawback of the standard SPH-method is its inability to accurately interpolate when particles are
uneven spaced and sized. Also for boundary particles the constant reproducing conditions are violated.
Reproducing conditions (or completeness) are expressed in terms of the order of the polynomial which must
be represented exactly. For second order partial differential equations, linear fields must be represented
exactly, see [1]. There exists a number of possibilities to improve the approximation technique of the SPH-
method, see e.g. [2,5] or [7]. For linear completeness the following conditions must be fulfilled:
X
n X
n X
n X
n X
n
Uj ðxÞxj ¼ x Uj ðxÞyj ¼ y Uj ðxÞzj ¼ z Uj ðxÞ ¼ 1 rUj ðxÞ ¼ 0 ð2:9Þ
j¼1 j¼1 j¼1 j¼1 j¼1

Dilts [2] and Scheffer and Hiermaier [13] fulfilled these conditions by using a moving least square (MLS)
approach. The approach in [13] is adopted in this SPH-Code. The principle property of MLS is to exactly
reproduce a given set of functions. To satisfy the reproducing conditions in Eq. (2.9) the base functions pj
are chosen as:
pðxÞ ¼ ð 1 x y zÞ 8x 2 R3 ð2:10Þ
It is easy possible to increase the order of completeness by modifying the base functions. The MLS
approximation is given by
X
n
uh ðxÞ ¼ pj ðxÞqðxÞ ð2:11Þ
j¼1

with q chosen to minimize the functional

X n  2
J¼ pjT qðxÞ  uj W ðx  xj ; hÞ ð2:12Þ
j¼1

The fact that q depends on x accounts for the moving part of the name. The solution of q is easily found and
gives the approximation:
X
n
uh ðxÞ ¼ uj U j ð2:13Þ
j¼1

with

Uj ¼ pðxÞT AðxÞ1 pj W ðx  xj ; hÞ
X
AðxÞ ¼ pj pjT Wj ðx  xj ; hÞ ð2:14Þ
j

The gradient of the shape function Uj is obtained by simply derivating Eq. (2.14):
 
rUi ¼ rpT A1 pi  pT A1 rA A1 pi Wi þ pT A1 pi rWi ð2:15Þ
In the SPH-Code the standard SPH shape functions are just substituted by the MLS interpolants. The
drawback of this MLSPH-version is the lack of an appropriate boundary treatment. Sauer et al. [12]
solved this problem by simply not considering the central particle in the sum on all particles. This allows for
550 T. Rabczuk et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 71 (2004) 547–556

a free-surface in simple cases. They reported that problems at edges and corners may arise when the cal-
culation proceeds further.
The SPH-method is applied onto the conservation equations of continuum mechanics, the conservation
of mass, momentum and energy. Neglecting terms of thermomechanical and frictional forces, the equations
have the form:
dq d_x 1 de r
¼ qr x_ ; ¼ r r; ¼ : r  x_ ð2:16Þ
dt dt q dt q
where d=dt is the material time derivative, q the density, x_ the velocity vector, r the Cauchy stress tensor, e
the internal specific energy and the r-operator indicates the spatial derivations.
The conservation equations of continuum mechanics in the SPH-form are:

dqi X
¼ qi ð_xi  x_ j Þ rUj
dt j

d_xi X ri þ rj
¼ rUj ð2:17Þ
dt j
qi
!
dei 1 X ri þ rj
¼ ðxi  xj Þ rUj
dt 2 j
qi

where either the standard shape functions U or the MLS-interpolants U can be used. There exist a variety of
different stress and strain measurements. In hydrocodes the strain rate is usually calculated via the velocity
gradient. It can be divided into a symmetric and an antisymmetric part:

e_ ¼ 12ðr  x_ þ r  x_ Þ
ð2:18Þ
r_ ¼ 12ðr  x_  r  x_ Þ

Under this definition corresponding stresses would not be frame indifferent. To avoid unphysical rotations
of the material a frame-indifferent stress-rate will be used. The Jaumann rate is the most widely used in
hydrocodes and is here adopted, too. After performing the stress-rotation the new stress-tensor is calculated
by

rtþDt ¼ rt þ Dr þ C with C ¼ rt r_ tþðDt=2Þ þ rt r_ tþðDt=2Þ ð2:19Þ

An artificial viscosity is introduced in order to handle with shock-waves in a numerical code. The artificial
viscosity smoothes shocks over a few resolution lengths and thus stabilizes the numerical solution. In this
SPH-Code the viscosity developed by Monaghan and Gingold [9] is adopted:
8 2
9
< acij lij þ blij =
Pij ¼ ð_xi  x_ j Þ ðxi  xj Þ < 0 ð2:20Þ
: qij ;
0 else
with
hð_xi  x_ j Þ ðxi  xj Þ fi þ fj
lij ¼
kxi  xj k þ xh2 2

jr x_ ji
fi ¼
jr x_ ji þ jr  x_ ji þ 0:0001ci =h
 T. Rabczuk et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 71 (2004) 547–556 551

cij and qij are the average velocity of sound and density of the particles i and j, respectively. The parameters
a and b are of order unity and x is usually taken to 0.1 and is only necessary to avoid singularities. The
system of differential equations is integrated over the time with the modified leap-frog algorithm.

3. The constitutive law for concrete

Unlike the usual constitutive laws in hydrocodes the stress-tensor is not divided into a deviatoric and
hydrostatic part. A constitutive law for concrete developed by Schmidt-Hurtienne [14] is modified and
implemented in the SPH-Code. The constitutive law is a coupled damage-plasticity model taking into
account the dynamic strength increase under high velocity loading.

3.1. The static part

The strain-tensor is decomposed into an elastic and a plastic part:

e ¼ ee þ ep ð3:1Þ
The elastic part determines the shape of the stress–strain curve, the plastic part is only relevant for the
unloading and reloading region (see Fig. 2).
The stress–strain relation can be written as:
rst ¼ ½1  Dðjd Þcðtree ÞE0 : ðe  ep Þ ð3:2Þ
with E0 is initial elastic tensor, D is damage variable, jd is equivalent damage strain, cðtree Þ is stiffness
function of the concrete Hugoniot-curve, ee is elastic strain tensor, ep is plastic strain tensor.
The damage variable D depends on the equivalent damage strain jd the elastic strain tensor is projected
on. Under high hydrostatic pressure the damaged concrete behaves like a granular material. This kind of
damage isnÕt taken into account in the damage surface. Therefore a stiffness function c is introduced to
reproduce the data of the Hugoniot-tests made by Ockert [11].
The Hsieh–Ting–Chen [4] failure surface in the strain space is adapted as damage surface Fd while the
plastic surface Fp is based on the positive projection of the elastic strain tensor according to the rule that
microcrack-damage develops perpendicular to the direction of the largest principal strain:
 pffiffiffiffiffi 
Fd ¼ c1 J2e þ jd c2 J2e þ c3 eðaÞ e 2
e;max þ c4 I1  jd ¼ 0 ð3:3Þ

dσ p
dσe
dσ d
dσ

dεe dε
dεp dεd
E0 E(D)

εp dεp εe dε
ε

Fig. 2. Constitutive law of concrete.

552 T. Rabczuk et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 71 (2004) 547–556
  1 2
Fp ¼ 2 eþ
1 þ  
e : ee þ cc ee : ee  2jp ¼ 0 ð3:4Þ
ðaÞ
with c1 c4 is parameter of the damage surface, I1e , J2e is 1. invariant of P ee , 2. invariant of dev ee , ee;max is
maximum (ath) characteristic value of ee , ee ¼ P : ee , ee ¼ ee  ee , P ¼ a H ðe Þ d  d  d  d ðaÞ ,
þ þ  þ þ ðaÞ ðaÞ ðaÞ ðaÞ

H is Heaviside function, eþ e is positive projection of ee , d

ðaÞ
is characteristic vector of ee .
A modified Weibull distribution is chosen to describe the damage evolution:
 g 
1  eððjd e0 Þ=ed Þ d jd P e0
Dðjd Þ ¼ ð3:5Þ
0 jd < e 0
The correlation between the internal plastic variable qp and the plastic equivalent strain jp is described in
Eq. (3.6):
qp ðjp Þ ¼ cp ðjp  ed Þð1  eðjp ed Þ=ep1 Þeðjp =ep2 Þ 8jp P ed ð3:6Þ
with material constants e0 , ed , gd , ep1 , ep2 and cp .

3.2. The dynamic part

The static constitutive relation is extended to include inertia effects causing the dynamic strength increase
of concrete materials. Because the load history has a significant influence over the strength increase of
concrete the constitutive law is supplemented with a dynamic part which decays the static damage evo-
lution. The stress–strain relation can be formulated as follows:
r ¼ ½1  ðDðjd Þ  Ddyn Þcðtree ÞE0 : ðee  ep Þ ð3:7Þ
The dynamic damage Ddyn is defined as:
Z t
oD
Ddyn ¼ hðt  sÞ ds ð3:8Þ
s¼0 os

A simplified Maxwell relaxation is chosen as dynamic decay function [14]:

hðt  sÞ ¼ eðtsÞ=# ð3:9Þ
# is the relaxation time. Using this 1-parameter decay function equation (3.8) can be evaluated analytically
into an incremental form. One disadvantage is that only certain domains of strain rate can be simulated
realistically with such a constitutive law. Schmidt-Hurtienne [14] uses a generalized Maxwell relaxation,
which can also be used in the SPH-Code.

4. Numerical results

At the Institute of Concrete Structure Hermann [3] performed explosion tests of concrete slabs with
different thickness and strength. The numerical results are compared with the data from two tests.
The dimensions of the first slab were 100  50  100 cm3 and the concrete had a compressive strength of
48 MPa. The plate was loaded by a low explosive with a detonation velocity vdet ¼ 3800 m/s. At the middle
of the slab directly under the explosive cone hydrostatic pressures were measured (see Fig. 3(a)). The
material parameters are listed in Table 1.
The second slab was 20 cm thinner than the first one (100  30  100 cm3 ) and the concrete had a
compressive strength of 200 MPa. This slab was loaded by a explosive cone of TNT and Composition B.
The inner cone consisted of TNT and the outer cone of Composition B, which was used to produce a plane
 T. Rabczuk et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 71 (2004) 547–556 553

200

103
68

15
50
85
120
15 5
190

gauges

75

20
55
90
125
500

160
195
300
gauges

1000 1000

(a) (b) [mm]

Fig. 3. Slab and cone dimensions: (a) first slab, (b) second slab.

Table 1
Material parameters for the 48 MPa concrete
c1 ¼ 0:012324 c4 ¼ 0:346484 e0 ¼ 2:5  105 cc ¼ 0:08 cp ¼ 0:9
c2 ¼ 0:025166 E0 ¼ 36; 000 N/mm2 ed ¼ 2:2  104 q ¼ 2:4  103 ep1 ¼ 1:1  103
c3 ¼ 0:782058 m ¼ 0:22 gd ¼ 1:5 # ¼ 15 ls ep2 ¼ 0:4

Table 2
Material parameters for the 200 MPa concrete
c1 ¼ 0:012324 c4 ¼ 0:346484 e0 ¼ 1:0  104 cc ¼ 0:08 cp ¼ 0:9
c2 ¼ 0:025166 E0 ¼ 73; 000 N/mm2 ed ¼ 2:9  104 q ¼ 2:4  103 ep1 ¼ 1:1  103
c3 ¼ 0:782058 m ¼ 0:22 gd ¼ 2:5 # ¼ 15 ls ep2 ¼ 0:4

wave. The measured pressures are compared with those obtained by the SPH-simulation. The positions of
the gauges are shown in Fig. 3(b). The material constants for the numerical simulation are given in Table 2.
The SPH-simulation was carried out with 380,000 concrete particles for the first plate and 320,000
concrete particles for the second plate. The calculations were performed on a parallel computer with 77
MHz and 308 Mflop/s using 16 processors. One time step took on the average 54 CPU-seconds for the
first slab and 39 CPU-seconds for the second slab.
In Fig. 4(a) and (b) the maximum pressures of the two slabs are illustrated and compared with those
from the SPH-simulation. Except at the position of the first two gauges in slab 1, where the pressures
obtained by the SPH-simulation are larger than those from the test, the two sets of results agree very well.
In Fig. 5 photos of the plates after the explosion are shown. The first plate is only slightly damaged at the
upper surface (see Fig. 5(c)), the second plate has a big crater at the undersurface and was severely damaged
at the upper side as well.
In Fig. 6(a) and (b) the fragmentation process of the two slabs in the numerical simulation is shown.
These figures show the advantage of the SPH-method. No numerical problems are observed, which might
be suffered by numerical methods based on meshes. Nevertheless there have to be made some simplifica-
tions to obtain a fragment distribution from the numerical simulation. Therefore separated particles with a
certain distance from the slab and a damage of D ¼ 1 are deleted during the calculation.
554 T. Rabczuk et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 71 (2004) 547–556

1200 20000
maximum pressure [MPa]

maximum pressure[MPa]
18000
1000
16000
experiment 14000 experiment
800 SPH
12000 SPH
experiment experiment
600 SPH 10000 SPH
8000
400
6000
200 4000
2000
0 0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0.0 5.0 10.0 15.0 20.0
(a) slab thickness [cm] (b) slab thickness [cm]

Fig. 4. Maximum pressure of the gauges of the experiment and the SPH-simulations of (a) the first slab, (b) the second slab.

Fig. 5. Damage of the slabs after the experiment: (a) upside of the second slab, (b) bottom side of the second slab, (c) first slab.

Fig. 6. Fragmentation of (a) the first slab, (b) the second slab.

To show the good agreement between test and calculation the damage in the middle of the slabs is
compared (see Fig. 7). The agreement between the calculation and the test of the first slab is quite good. For
the second plate the calculation reproduces the damage at the undersurface quite well, the diameter at the
upper surface predicted by the numerical simulation is larger than that from the test. The particles are
compressed in the middle. This indicates a big damage which was also observed in the experiment.
Finally the fragment distribution is of interest. In the experiments, a total fragment mass of 9.1 and 87 kg
emerged at the first and second plate, respectively. The SPH-simulation calculated a total fragment mass of
17.3 and 86 kg, respectively. The fragment distribution is illustrated in Fig. 8(a) and (b).
 T. Rabczuk et al. / Engineering Fracture Mechanics 71 (2004) 547–556 555

Fig. 7. Crater in the middle of (a) the first slab, (b) the second slab.
cumulative frequency [%]

100 100
cumulative frequency [%]

90 90
80 80
70 70
60 60
50 experiment 50
40 computation 40
experiment
30 30
20 20 computation
10 10
0 0
0 16 32 48 64 0 16 32 48 64 80 96 112 128 144
(a) fragment distribution [mm] (b) fragment distribution [mm]

Fig. 8. Fragment distribution of (a) the first slab, (b) the second slab.

5. Future work

It has been shown that the SPH-method can model the fragmentation process of concrete under contact
detonation. For severely damaged concrete slabs the calculations should be improved. This can be done
using a higher particle resolution of the concrete slabs. It should be mentioned, that concrete is a hetero-
geneous material. So the experimental results vary extremely.

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