Case Study: Picatinny Arsenal achieves accurate fracture prediction and 36x faster drop-test simulation with Dassault Systèmes (Abaqus/SIMULIA)

Co-simulation with XFEM technology evaluates safety of hand grenade drop

Picatinny Arsenal engineers needed to ensure the safety and predictable performance of the M67 hand grenade under accidental drops, specifically to capture fracture behavior that can occur off element boundaries. Using Dassault Systemes’ Abaqus (including the XFEM fracture capability), they faced the challenge of combining accurate crack modeling with transient, highly dynamic drop simulations.

Dassault Systemes implemented a co-simulation approach that ran most of the model in Abaqus/Explicit for the transient impact and used Abaqus/Standard with XFEM in the enriched handle region to model fracture. The co-simulation produced comparable stress, plastic strain, and crack-growth results to fully implicit analyses while cutting run time dramatically (10 minutes for co-simulation versus 6 hours for the implicit analysis), validating the method and enabling faster, reliable design assessments for future testing scenarios.

Picatinny Arsenal