Ghost stabilisation of the Material Point Method for stable quasi-static and dynamic analysis of large deformation problems

Abstract: The unstable nature of the material point method is widely documented and is a barrier to the method being used for routine engineering analyses of large deformation problems. The vast majority of papers concerning this issue are focused on the instabilities that manifest when a material point crosses between background grid cells. However, there are other issues related to the stability of material point methods. This paper focuses on the issue of the conditioning of the global system of equations caused by the arbitrary nature of the position of the physical domain relative to the background computational grid. The issue is remedied here via the use of a Ghost stabilisation technique that penalises variations in the gradient of the solution field near the boundaries of the physical domain. This technique transforms the stability of the material point method, providing a robust computational framework for large deformation dynamic and quasi-static analysis.