EUROPLEXUS simulation of steel plates without and with pre-formed holes or slits tested in the NTNU SIMlab shock tube facility

This report presents some EUROPLEXUS [1] simulations of thin steel plates with various types of pre-formed holes or slits that have been tested in the SIMLab Shock Tube Facility (SSTF) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. The SSTF is able to generate a clean and repeatable blast-like pressure loading without resorting to the use of explosives. The simulations presented here concern blast-like loading (in the SSTF shock tube) of thin steel plates with pre-formed square holes or pre-formed X-shaped and +-shaped slits. The presence of these initial defects triggers, in a clean and repeatable way, the formation and propagation of cracks, eventually leading to complete failure of the plate (for sufficiently high firing pressures). Equivalent full plates, i.e. without defects or openings, are also simulated numerically as limiting cases, in order to investigate the effect of Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) on the behavior of the holed/slitted plates, and in particular on the formation and propagation of cracks from the hole corners and from the slit ends.