A typical application of the ALE method is using high velocity impacts.
Here a cylinder, moving at 227 m/s, impacts with a rigid wall. The material is copper, with a
yield stress of 400 MPa. The initial diameter is 6.4 mm and initial length is 32.4
mm. The simulation was performed using two different methods: ALE and standard
Lagrangian. The results can be seen in Figure 1. Figure 1. Cylinder Impact Deformation
It can be seen that the cylinder mesh using ALE remains regular, unlike the Lagrange method, where large element deformation creates very small and skewed elements. This reduces the time step, leading to more time step cycles. However, each ALE cycle takes longer than a Lagrangian.
