SUMMARY

Characterization of the high strain rate response of metals has received significant attention from both experimental and modeling perspectives due to the numerous applications that hinge on understanding the dynamic response of metals. Although many experimental works have shown a significant influence of the initial and evolving material microstructure on both the subsequent shock and damage response, relatively little modeling work has sought to address this influence. The proposed work focuses on directly modeling the influence of substructure on the high strain rate response of metals. A steady plastic wave formulation has been generalized to include a more general anisotropic elastic-plsatic response, thus bypassing computational cost, complexity, and regularization methods employed in existing finite element and finite difference methods. It is anticipated that direct modeling of shock waves in crystals will provide enhanced insight into the physical mechanisms responsible for mictrostructure evolution at high rates, and will improve understanding of the influence of microstructure on the high strain rate response of metals.