Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

It's the time of the year again to grab a Christmas tree, put up some lights and find the ornaments carefully stashed somewhere in the house.

'Tis the season to be jolly,...

If you're our neighbour you'll also decorate the bamboo "trees" in front of the house, but hey o bamboo tree, o bamboo tree doesn't sound so bad. 

As it happens, every so often, some ornaments feel more adventurous and want to meet the floor. We simulated two ornaments falling to the ground using brittle cracking.

I made both ornaments in Abaqus as shells using the part design. Then I added a simple steel ground and carefully positioned the two ornaments. The green ball had a diameter of ~45mm, while the red ornament  120mm

For material I used a nice glass-like material: E=70 GPa, ν=0.23, ρ=2500 kg / m³. Then we add the brittle cracking properties as shown below:

For the brittle cracking option, the mesh needs to be very very dense, since the "crack" is represented by elements being deleted if they fail. So using something more coarse, doesn't have the appearance of a crack. For this model, a characteristic element length of 0.2mm for both ornaments was used.

Then I defined a general contact , with a 0.1 friction coefficient and an initial velocity of 4 m/s for the red ornament and 5 m/s green ornament. Lastly, an explicit/dynamic step was defined with a time period of 0.005s.

...Fa la la la la, la la la la!

After a few hours  of intense simulation, voila

Enjoy your holidays, and we look forward engaging with you in 2022 again.