Impact Testing and Analysis for Structural Code Benchmarking*

Sandia National Laboratories, in cooperation with industry and other national laboratories, has been benchmarking computer codes (\"Structural Code Benchmarking for the Analysis of Impact Response of Nuclear Material Shipping Casks,\" R. E. Glass, Sandia National Laboratories, 1985; \"Sample Problem Manual for Benchmarking of Cask Analysis Codes,\" R. E. Glass, Sandia National Laboratories, 1988; \"Standard Thermal Problem Set for the Evaluation of Heat Transfer Codes Used in the Assessment of Transportation Packages, R. E. Glass, et al., Sandia National Laboratories, 1988) used to predict the structural, thermal, criticality, and shielding behavior of radioactive materials packages. The first step in the benchmarking of the codes was to develop standard problem sets and to compare the results from several codes and users. This step for structural analysis codes has been completed as descnbed in \"Structural Code Benchmarking for the Analysis of Impact Response of Nuclear Material Shipping Casks,\" R. E. Glass, Sandia National Laboratories, 1985. The problem set is shown in Fig. 1. This problem set exercised the ability of the codes to predict the response to end (axisymmetric) and side (plane strain) impacts with both elastic and elastic/plastic materials.