Analysis of fragmentation in shock physics simulation

Analyzing shock physics, which can involve high energies, high velocity materials, and highly variable results, is challenging. Very little can be measured during a shock physics experiment. Most experimental data is collected in the aftermath. High-fidelity simulations using codes like CTH are possible, but require a significant amount of post processing to properly understand the results. Physical structures and their accompanying data must be derived from the volumetric properties computed by the simulation. And, of course, the simulations must be validated against experiments. To capture small fragmentation effects, the CTH simulations must be run on very large scales using adaptive meshes, which further complicates the post processing. By using the scalable visualization tool Para View coupled with customized feature identification, we are able to provide both the analysis and verification of these large-scale CTH simulations.