Blast wave propagation in complex urban environment

DANIEL AMBROSINI; BIBIANA LUCCIONI; RODOLFO DANESI

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Congreso; 7th World Congress on Computational Mechanics; 2006

Due to different accidental or intentional events, related to important structures all over the world, explosive loads have received considerable attention in recent years. Unfortunately, the recent attack to the World Trade Center as well as many attacks in the entire world shows that the activity in connection with terrorism has increased and the present tendency suggests that it will be even larger in the future. This paper is concerned about the dynamic loading and the associated damage produced by the detonation of high explosives materials in urban environments, a situation likely to be expected in most terrorist attacks. When a structure is designed to resist blast attacks, a very important issue is the determination of the dynamic loading starting from different scenarios of possible locations of the mass of the explosive. Historically the analysis of explosions either has predominantly involved simplified analytical methods or has required the use of supercomputers for detailed numerical simulations. With the rapid development of computer hardware over the last decades, it has become possible to make detailed numerical simulations of explosive events in personal computers, significantly increasing the availability of these methods. On the other hand, new developments in integrated computer hydrocodes complete the tools necessary to carry out the numerical analysis successfully.