Engine Impeller Sub-Fragmentation Simulation Using EFG Method

Engine impeller burst containment test may lead to the impeller sub-fragmentation. The containment of the impeller debris from sub-fragmentation presents a new challenge, because of the unpredictable pattern of dynamic fracture. In this study, the capability of EFG failure method in predicting the dynamic fracture of the ductile material, used for the engine impeller under impact loading, is demonstrated. In the EFG method, the combination of fast transformation method and meshfree visibility approach with cohesive fracture is proven to be an efficient way to model the progressive fracture in a general three-dimensional problem. In this study, the Mode-I fracture is adopted and the crack is assumed to propagate cell-by-cell in the direction of maximum principal stress. The meshfree visibility approach is introduced to impose the strong-discontinuity in the meshfree approximation as well as to compute the displacement jump in the initially rigid cohesive model.