Craters produced by underground explosions

BIBIANA LUCCIONI; DANIEL AMBROSINI; GERALD NURICK; IZAK SNYMAN

COMPUTERS & STRUCTURES

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Año: 2009 vol. 87 p. 1366 - 1373

0045-7949

Extensive research activities in the field of blast loads have taken place in the last few decades. There aremany experimental results related to underground explosions. The mechanism of crater formation iscomplex and it is related to the dynamic physical properties of air, soil and air/soil interface. Studies concernedwith the characteristics of craters caused by explosions usually resort to dimensional analysis andstatistics. Some empirical equations proposed for the evaluation of crater dimensions can be found in theliterature. Nevertheless, they were obtained for particular type of soils, shapes of explosives, ranges ofexplosive mass and depth of explosive and they present considerable variability.The main objective of this paper is to prove the accuracy of numerical simulation of craters produced byunderground explosions. For this purpose, the numerical analysis of crater formation due to undergroundexplosions is performed with a hydrocode. Several numerical approaches are carried out using differentmodels and processors for the soil. Moreover, different alternatives for the constitutive model of the soilare used.Comparison with experimental results is performed in order to validate the numerical approach andprove its ability to model the crater formation. Many simulations of the same physical model lead tothe same crater dimensions and a good agreement between the test results and the predicted crater measuresis achieved.