Structural impact and dynamics response in brittle materials

Impact events occur in a wide variety of circumstances, from everyday occur-rence as the striking of a nail with a hammer, to the protection of spacecraft against meteoroid impact. In the present paper, we restricted our attention on a small scale event of the problem, which namely is the impact on heterogeneous materials, as the runway pavement, during an air-craft landing. We propose a theoretical model based on shock wave-induced phase transforma-tions after the impact due to the landing of the aircraft, considering the contact phenomena pro-duced by the impact. We investigated a small scale model of the fragmentation phenomena which simulates the concrete asphalt behavior at macro scale. This phenomenon is strictly linked with material degradation associated with damage evolution. The problem is developed by energetic approach on an elasto-plastic element by utilizing the functional energy containing two contributions, bulk and surface. The model simulates the behavior of flexible runway pavements during the landing phase.