Blast Mitigation For Structures

The Blast Mitigation for Structures Program (BMSP) is a research and development activity conducted by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to improve the performance of buildings that are targets of terrorist attack. The primary goal of the BMSP is to reduce loss of life and injuries to the occupants of these buildings through the development of innovative techniques for new structures and retrofitting existing facilities. The committee's findings and recommendations are contained in this initial assessment report.

The Blast Mitigation for Structures Program (BMSP) is a research and development activity conducted by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to improve the performance of buildings that are targets of terrorist attack. The primary goal of the BMSP is to reduce loss of life and injuries to the occupants of these buildings through the development of innovative techniques for new structures and retrofitting existing facilities. The committee's findings and recommendations are contained in this initial assessment report.

Concerned with the vulnerability of U.S. civilian and military personnel to terrorist bombing attacks, the U.S. Congress directed the Department of Defense to undertake a comprehensive research and testing program aimed at protecting people in buildings from such attacks. The Blast Mitigation for Structures Program (BMSP) was initiated in 1997 and has produced a large volume of experimental and analytical data that will permit the design of new, more robust buildings as well as the development of methods to retrofit a large number of vulnerable existing structures. This report reviews the BMSP program and investigates a process that would use existing institutional infrastructures (i.e., building code and standards-writing organizations, professional and technical organizations, universities, and research centers) to disseminate knowledge.

Standard ASCE/SEI 59-22 provides minimum requirements for planning, design, construction, and assessment of new and existing buildings subject to the effects of accidental or malicious explosions.

This book primarily focuses on methodologies to enable marine structures to resist high velocity impact loadings. It is based on invited talks presented at the recent India–USA workshop on “Recent Advances in Blast Mitigation Strategies in Civil and Marine Composite Structures” The book comprises content from top researchers from India and the USA and covers various aspects of the topic, including modeling and simulation, design aspects, experimentation and various challenges. These failure modes significantly reduce the structural integrity of the marine structures unless they are designed to resist such harsh loadings. Understanding the mechanics of these structures under harsh loadings is still an open area of research, and the behavior of these structures is not fully understood. The book highlights efforts to reduce the effects of blast loadings on marine composite structures. Intended for researchers/scientists and practicing engineers, the book focuses not only the design and analysis challenges of marine composite structures under such harsh loading conditions, but also provides new design guidelines.

Terrorist attacks and other destructive incidents caused by explosives have, in recent years, prompted considerable research and development into the protection of structures against blast loads. For this objective to be achieved, experiments have been performed and theoretical studies carried out to improve our assessments of the intensity as well as the space-time distribution of the resulting blast pressure on the one hand and the consequences of an explosion to the exposed environment on the other.This book aims to enhance awareness on and understanding of these topical issues through a collection of relevant, Transactions of the Wessex Institute of Technology articles written by experts in the field. The book starts with an overview of key physics-based algorithms for blast and fragment environment characterisation, structural response analyses and structural assessments with reference to a terrorist attack in an urban environment and the management of its inherent uncertainties.A subsequent group of articles is concerned with the accurate definition of blast pressure, which is an essential prerequisite to the reliable assessment of the consequences of an explosion. Other papers are concerned with alternative methods for the determination of blast pressure, based on experimental measurements or neural networks. A final group of articles reports investigations on predicting the response of specific structural entities and their contents.The book concludes with studies on the effectiveness of steel-reinforced polymer in improving the performance of reinforced concrete columns and the failure mechanisms of seamless steel pipes used in nuclear industry.

Blast Mitigation: Experimental and Numerical Studies covers both experimental and numerical aspects of material and structural response to dynamic blast loads and its mitigation. The authors present the most up-to-date understanding from laboratory studies and computational analysis for researchers working in the field of blast loadings and their effect on material and structural failure, develop designs for lighter and highly efficient structural members for blast energy absorption, discuss vulnerability of underground structures, present methods for dampening blast overpressures, discuss structural post blast collapse and give attention to underwater explosion and implosion effects on submerged infrastructure and mitigation measures for this environment.