Accelerated Explicit Dynamics Simulations of Impact Problems Using GPU-Enabled Material Models in MOOSE

  • Schwen, Daniel (Idaho National Laboratory)
  • Hu, Tianchen (Argonne National Laboratory)
  • Huddleston, Bradley (Idaho National Laboratory)

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Advanced nuclear reactor designs, including transportable small modular reactors and pebble bed reactors, introduce new challenges requiring prediction of material behavior under dynamic loading conditions. Simulating these high-rate deformation events demands explicit time integration methods coupled with complex constitutive models, creating significant computational demands that limit the scale and fidelity of practical simulations. This work presents a novel computational framework that addresses this challenge by integrating the New Engineering Materials Library Version 2 (NEML2) [1] with Idaho National Laboratory's Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) [2] for explicit dynamics applications. The key innovation is a direct interface for computing nodal forces within NEML2, enabling material model evaluation on GPU accelerators while maintaining access to MOOSE's robust infrastructure for boundary conditions, contact algorithms, and parallel domain decomposition. This approach eliminates the computational overhead of transferring material state information between libraries during each time step - a critical bottleneck when using sophisticated constitutive models in explicit simulations. The framework capabilities are demonstrated through three-dimensional Taylor anvil impact simulations incorporating coupled thermomechanical physics. The explicit multiphysics time integrator enables simultaneous solution of heat transfer and mechanical deformation, capturing temperature evolution from plastic work during high-rate impacts. The computational efficiency gains enable Bayesian calibration of material model parameters against experimental data, facilitating robust uncertainty quantification in constitutive model predictions. Verification against implicit MOOSE solutions confirms excellent agreement, while validation studies compare simulation predictions with experimental Taylor anvil tests on various materials. This computational capability enables high-fidelity simulation of large-scale reactor systems under dynamic loading conditions, supporting the development and safety analysis of advanced nuclear technologies. The framework's combination of accelerator-enabled material models with established multiphysics infrastructure provides a path toward practical explicit dynamics simulations of complex engineering systems. REFERENCES [1] Hu, Tianchen, et al. "NEML2: A High Performance Library for Constitutive Modeling.", Sep. 2024. https