Caltech Contact: Mark Stalzer
Email: mark at cacr.caltech.edu
Website: http://psaap.caltech.edu

The primary goal of the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP) is to bring about validated, large-scale, multidisciplinary, simulation-based Predictive Science as a major academic and applied research program. Caltech's role in the PSAAP is to establish a Multidiscipline Simulation Center (MSC) which will develop a multidisciplinary Predictive Science methodology focusing on high-energy-density dynamic response of materials as it arises in hypervelocity impact. Predictive Science will be demonstrated by means of a concerted and highly integrated experimental, computational, and analytical effort that focuses on an overarching ASC-class problem: hypervelocity normal and oblique impact of metallic projectiles and targets, at velocities up to 10 km/s. Depending on impact velocity and material choices, physics that will challenge modeling and simulation can include melting and vaporization, dissociation, ionization, and plasma formation; luminescence and radiative transport, solid-solid phase transitions, high-strain-rate deformation and thermomechanical coupling; fracture, fragmentation, spall and ejecta; deformation instabilities such as shear banding; hydrodynamic instabilities, mixed-phase flows, anddepending on material choicesmixing. The overarching hypervelocity impact application, in conjunction with a rigorous and novel methodology for model-based uncertainty quantification, will provide the intellectual backbone of the Center and its chief organizing principle. In particular, the quantification of margins and uncertainties (QMU) will drive and closely coordinate the experimental, computational, modeling, software development, verification and validation efforts.