Numerical modeling of blast wave propagation in a generic facility

Abstract

Accurate evaluation of interior wall response to blast in a building requires the use of a coupled fluid-structure dynamics methodology. The reason is that the walls respond to the blast loading on the time-scale of the blast reverberation within the building. When the wall fails due to blast loading, the debris as well as the airblast propagate into adjacent rooms to load the next layer of walls. To provide better understanding this phenomenon, a program has been initiated which combines experimental and computational efforts. The program objective is to improve the understandings of internal blast damage and fragment dispersion phenomena under the transient/quasi-static pressure condition, so as to improbé the modeling of these scenarios in fast-running codes. The paper will describe the numerical simulations conducted, in which we modeled CMU walls response to blast in a generic facility. The results show that the numerical code was able to accurately predict wall breach due to nearby charge, the complete wall movement, and the loading of the second wall first by the airblast, then by the high-inertia slower-moving wall. Comparison of pressure time histories between the measured and predicte data show good agreement both in detonation room as well as the adjacent bay.