Material Point Method - History of PIC/MPM

History of PIC/MPM

The PIC was originally conceived to solve problems in fluid dynamics, and developed by Harlow at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1957. One of the first PIC codes was the Fluid-Implicit Particle (FLIP) program, which was created by Brackbill in 1986 and has been constantly in development ever since. Until the 1990s, the PIC method was used principally in fluid dynamics.

Motivated by the need for better simulating penetration problems in solid dynamics, Sulsky, Chen and Schreyer started in 1993 to reformulate the PIC and develop the MPM, with funding from Sandia National Laboratories. The original MPM was then further extended by Bardenhagen et al.. to include frictional contact, which enabled the simulation of granular flow, and by Nairn to include explicit cracks and crack propagation (known as CRAMP).

Recently, an MPM implementation based on a micro-polar Cosserat continuum has been used to simulate high-shear granular flow, such as silo discharge. MPM's uses were further extended into Geotechnical engineering with the recent development of a quasi-static, implicit MPM solver which provides numerically stable analyses of large-deformation problems in Soil mechanics.

Annual workshops on the use of MPM are held at various locations in the United States. The Fifth MPM Workshop is scheduled to be held at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, OR, on April 2 and 3, 2009.