Achievement

First-year Trainee Andrew Tonge has developed models of brittle fragmentation using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). SPH has been very successful for astrophysical and fluids models, but its application to solid mechanics is very recent. The focus of Andrew's work is investigating scaling in hypervelocity impact as the projectile and target are scaled from laboratory to asteroid size. In order to support his work, Andrew and advisor Prof. Ramesh (Mechanical Engineering) work with Prof. Dalrymple (Civil Engineering), a noted expert on SPH for free surface flow, and with researchers at the Applied Physics Labs who are studying planetary impact. This collaboration marks a new interdisciplinary research group that has emerged from this IGERT. Computations will be done using the NVidia GPU cluster that the MCS IGERT is participating in building.