Approach to Blast Resistant Design of Aging Transportation Structures with Little or No Stand-Off Distance

Considerations to blast loading by potential terrorist attacks have been increased in structural designs since September 11. Essential government and transportation facilities as well as symbolic private sector buildings have been targets of terrorists. Publicly available approaches to designing structures against blast loadings are not suitable for such urban structures, because the approaches were developed mainly for military projects, in which certain stand-off distances can be maintained from publicly open streets. Due to congested nature of urban environment, essential structural members are often exposed to the public with little or no stand-off distances. For this reason, the analysis to design urban structures against blast loading should be performed differently with a detonation with little or no stand-off distances. State-of-the-art software packages are useful to analyze blast effects on urban structures. However, they are not commonly used in structural design offices, because numerical modeling and simulation using the software are time-consuming and not practically affordable. The purpose of this exploratory research is to develop a novel simplified approach for blast analysis and design of steel structures with little or no stand-off distances for use by general structural engineers without access to the sophisticated software. The main focus of this study is on the riveted built-up shapes that are commonly used in aging urban transportation structures. A series of numerical simulations will be performed and used to quantify damage levels of structural members subjected to blast loads. The simulations will be based on detailed nonlinear explicit dynamic analyses for investigation of high-intensity and short-duration blast effects on structures using a fully coupled interaction technique between computational fluid and structural dynamics. Parametric studies of such analysis would result in certain patterns, which will then be used to develop quantifiable damage curves or equations of steel members for efficient mitigation design

Language

  • English

Project

  • Status: Completed
  • Funding: $23663
  • Contract Numbers:

    49198-21-28

  • Sponsor Organizations:

    Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

    University Transportation Centers Program
    Department of Transportation
    Washington, DC  United States  20590
  • Managing Organizations:

    University Transportation Research Center

    City College of New York
    Marshak Hall, Suite 910, 160 Convent Avenue
    New York, NY  United States  10031
  • Project Managers:

    Eickemeyer, Penny

  • Performing Organizations:

    Manhattan College

    Bronx,   United States 
  • Principal Investigators:

    Kim, Yongwook

    Wang, Qian

  • Start Date: 20160901
  • Expected Completion Date: 20180228
  • Actual Completion Date: 0
  • USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers Program

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01607621
  • Record Type: Research project
  • Source Agency: University Transportation Research Center
  • Contract Numbers: 49198-21-28
  • Files: UTC, RIP
  • Created Date: Aug 12 2016 4:51PM