Crystal plasticity including a phase-field deformation twinning model for the high-rate deformation of cyclotetramethylene tetranitramine

A new finite strain thermomechanical model for the high-rate deformation of the beta-polymorph of cyclotetramethylene tetranitramine (beta-HMX) has been developed and applied to simulations of plate impact experiments. The crystal plasticity model is based on a model developed previously for RDX (Luscher et al. 2017), which is extended to incorporate deformation twinning. Twinning during normal plate impacts is simulated with a phasefield twin model. First, material parameters governing the kinetics of dislocation slip are calibrated on the subset of simulations which had negative Schmid factors for the twin system. Second, a parametric study of the twin material parameters was performed to find suitable values. The results of the simulations with the phase-field twinning model are reported for impacts on several crystal orientations. We find that the twin growth decreases with increasing distance from the impact surface because of dissipation of the shock front via dislocation-mediated plasticity, and that the simulated interface velocity with and without phase-field twinning do not show appreciable differences. These modeling results suggest that the significance of twinning in beta-HMX cannot be determined with traditional loading configurations and diagnostics.

Automated summary

In this study, a new finite strain thermomechanical model was developed for the high-rate deformation of β-HMX. The crystal plasticity model, which incorporates deformation twinning, was applied to simulate plate impact experiments. The simulations showed that the growth of twinning decreases with increasing distance from the impact surface, and the interface velocity does not significantly differ with or without phase-field twinning. These results suggest that the importance of twinning in β-HMX cannot be accurately determined using traditional loading configurations and diagnostics.