An unresolved SPH-DEM model for simulation of ductile and brittle surface erosion by abrasive water-jet (AWJ) impact

The abrasive water-jet (AWJ) erosion process involves the complex interaction between fluid medium, abrasive particles and solid material, which brings great challenges to the establishment of numerical model. Because traditional grid-based methods are not suitable for the problems of local deformation and material removal, the meshfree method smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), based on the unresolved coupling and the discrete element method (DEM), is adopted to establish the model for AWJ study. The fluid medium is treated as a weakly compressible viscous liquid, the solid material is treated as an elastic-plastic material, and the abrasives are treated as rigid bodies. The fluid and solid phases are discretized with SPH particles, and the abrasives are described with DEM particles. The Johnson-Cook (J-C) and Johnson-Holmquist-II (JH-2) constitutive models are used to describe the stress-strain behavior of ductile and brittle materials, respectively. The effectiveness of the numerical model is further verified by AWJ impact experiments. The plastic deformation and cumulative failure characteristics of ductile materials, and the crack formation and propagation characteristics of brittle materials are systematically analyzed. The results provide insight for the AWJ research and lay a foundation for investigation of other complex fluid-particle flow in a numerical way.