Fundamentals Properties of Air Blast using Coupled Method - Part I

Accidental or intentional explosion events often damage structures and injure occupants. Terrorist bombings that have occurred in the past few years have greatly heightened the awareness of structural engineers of the threat of terrorist attack using explosive devices. Blast loading has received considerable attention in recent years. Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics gives a more accurate solution to large deformations and strains under high impact loading such as blasts as the analyzed domain is discretized with particles that are not connected with a mesh avoiding mesh distortion problems present in Finite element methodsand coupling of these two methods will provide even better results and save computational time. The fundamental properties of air blast using SPH have been assessed and studied from three R.C. examples namely, beam, portal frame and a concrete filled steel column. Air blast has been applied at particular standoff distances in all cases and the stress, strain and damage parameters have been studied. The study established that the use of SPH and FEM coupled method provided accurate results with respect to the conventional pressure time history graph plots and it can be confidently used for analysis of various other parameters of air blast subjected to structures.