Physically-based modeling and real-time simulation of terrain cratering and fragmentation due to explosions

The army is a major organization that uses simulators to imitate battles and scenarios for training purposes. One of the challenging problems in simulators today is to keep the real time aspect of the simulation while modeling physics-based dynamic terrain behavior. Cratering and fragmentation of the terrain due to explosions are the behavior of interest in this study.; We propose a physically-based approach to model the explosion event and the process of terrain fragmentation resulting in the formation of craters. Since blast waves are the destructive components of explosions, and propagate into materials as stress waves, geology has been introduced into the terrain model. Our methodology is based on voxel modeling and introduces a new method that uses connected-fragments to model terrain with the geology. The terrain is fragmented as a preprocessing step using the fractal dimension of each material in the geologic composition of the layered terrain. In addition, formulas about waves propagations and interactions have been simplified to permit real time processing of explosion events that can result in fragments detachments from the terrain.; We have used data form a real explosion experiment in a layered terrain to validate our model mathematically. Moreover, video footages of explosions have been compared to our explosion animations to validate the model visually. In our model, explosions can be placed anywhere in the simulation space and will still result in realistic output in real time.