The Virtual Test Facility
Welcome to the Virtual Test Facility website. This software was originally developed within the Caltech ASC Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response of Materials.
The Virtual Test Facility (VTF) is a source code collection of compressible
computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational solid dynamics (CSD) solvers. The
CFD solvers facilitate the computation of flows with strong shocks as well as fluid mixing.
The CSD solvers provide capabilities for simulation of dynamic response in solids such as large
plastic deformations, fracture and fragmentation. In addition, the VTF can be used to simulate
highly coupled fluid-structure interaction problems, such as the high rate deformation
experienced by a metallic solid target forced by the loading originating from the detonation of
energetic materials, or the rupture and fragmentation of brittle materials under shock wave
impact. At present, all VTF solvers use time-explicit numerical methods that track the various
wave phenomena responsible for mediating the dynamic response through the application of
suitable numerical methods.
Validation plays an integral role in the VTF development. A set of experiments aims at validating the entire simulation capability.
Computational results are available for the following experiments:
Currently, the downloadable VTF software consists of the following solver components that all can be used for coupled simulations, but are also stand-alone: