A study on blast-loaded aluminium plates with crack-like defects subjected to blast loading

This paper presents a study on AA6016 plates in temper T4 subjected to blast loading. Four different crack-like defects have been introduced in the plates to facilitate crack propagation as the dominating failure mode. Uniaxial tensile specimens extracted from a plate are used in the calibration of the *MAT_258 material model available in LS-DYNA. This material model contains a non-quadratic yield surface, isotropic work hardening and a failure model where the onset of failure is dependent on the element size as well as its bending-to-membrane loading ratio. Four different element sizes are investigated to assess the ability of the model to predict the onset of failure and subsequent crack propagation in blast-loaded plates by comparison to experiments conducted in a shock tube facility.