Shock-produced ejecta from tin: Comparative study by molecular dynamics and smoothed particle hydrodynamics methods

Experimental methods of observation of early stage of shock-induced ejecta from metal surface with micrometer-sized perturbations are still limited in terms of following a complete sequence of processes having microscale dimensions and nanoscale times. Therefore, simulations by the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and molecular dynamics (MD) methods can shed of light on details of micro-jet evolution. The size of simulated sample is too restricted in MD, but the simulations with large enough number of atoms can be scaled well to the sizes of realistic samples. To validate such scaling the comparative MD and SPH simulations of tin samples are performed. SPH simulation takes the realistic experimental sizes, while MD uses the proportionally scaled sizes of samples. It is shown that the velocity and mass distributions along the jets simulated by MD and SPH are in a good agreement. The observed difference in velocity of spikes between MD and experiments can be partially explained by a profound effect of surface tension on jets ejected from the small-scale samples.