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Hypo-elastoplasticity is a framework suitable for modeling the mechanics of many hard materials that have small elastic deformation and large plastic deformation. In laboratory tests for these materials the Cauchy stress is often in quasi-static equilibrium. Rycroft et al. discovered a mathematical correspondence between this physical system and the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, and developed a projection method similar to Chorin's projection method (1968) for incompressible Newtonian fluids. Here, we improve the original projection method to simulate quasi-static hypo-elastoplasticity, by making three improvements. First, drawing inspiration from the second-order projection method for incompressible Newtonian fluids, we formulate a second-order in time numerical scheme for quasi-static hypo-elastoplasticity. Second, we implement a finite element method for solving the elliptic equations in the projection step, which provides both numerical benefits and flexibility. Third, we develop an adaptive global time-stepping scheme, which can compute accurate solutions in fewer timesteps. Our numerical tests use an example physical model of a bulk metallic glass based on the shear transformation zone theory, but the numerical methods can be applied to any elastoplastic material. 

The impact of a liquid drop on a solid surface involves many intertwined physical effects, and is influenced by drop velocity, surface tension, ambient pressure and liquid viscosity, among others. Experiments by Kolinski et al. ( Phys. Rev. Lett. , vol. 112, no. 13, 2014 b , p. 134501) show that the liquid–air interface begins to deviate away from the solid surface even before contact. They found that the lift-off of the interface starts at a critical time that scales with the square root of the kinematic viscosity of the liquid. To understand this, we study the approach of a liquid drop towards a solid surface in the presence of an intervening gas layer. We take a numerical approach to solve the Navier–Stokes equations for the liquid, coupled to the compressible lubrication equations for the gas, in two dimensions. With this approach, we recover the experimentally captured early time effect of liquid viscosity on the drop impact, but our results show that lift-off time and liquid kinematic viscosity have a more complex dependence than the square-root scaling relationship. We also predict the effect of interfacial tension at the liquid–gas interface on the drop impact, showing that it mediates the lift-off behaviour.