Blast Simulator Wall Tests

Book excerpt: Loads generated in explosions that result from terrorist attacks and industrial accidents create devastating hazards for buildings and their occupants. The objective of this dissertation is to develop design guidelines and methodologies for protective/hardening strategies used to mitigate blast hazards in reinforced concrete and concrete masonry walls. Commonly, guidelines and methodologies are developed from experimental data. Field testing with live explosive is a reliable experimental method for demonstrating the performance of blast resistant concepts, but it is expensive, time consuming, and often produces low quality data. Static testing is another experimental method that allows researchers to clearly observe behavior and failure modes of structural components; however this too is limited because it cannot account for the rate effects associated with blast loads. The UCSD Blast Simulator was developed to offers an alternative method for testing structures to loads generated in an explosion without the difficulties and limitations associated with field and static testing. For this dissertation, tests were conducted with the blast simulator to study reinforced concrete walls protected with frangible panels, concrete masonry walls strengthened with carbon fiber reinforced polymer composite, and unreinforced masonry walls retrofitted with polyurea catcher systems. The objective of the dissertation was achieved through a succession of tasks that included; the development of a test protocol, validation and implementation of numerical models to predict loads delivered to specimens during blast simulator tests, development of method to correlate blast simulator loads to air blast loads, generation of high quality data on specimens with mitigation strategies for validation of numerical models to predict response of hardened/protected reinforced concrete and concrete masonry walls, and investigation of design variables with parametric studies. The investigation of concrete masonry walls demonstrated that the addition of carbon fiber reinforced polymers can increase the resistance to blast loads, but may result in a brittle failure mode. The study of reinforced concrete walls showed that frangible panels can improve the response by adding mass to the system. Finally, the research performed on unreinforced masonry walls with polyurea catcher emphasized the need for proper connection detailing.