Blast wave propagation in complex urban enviroment

DANIEL AMBROSINI; BIBIANA LUCCIONI; RODOLFO DANESI

Los Angeles CA, USA

Congreso; 7th World Congress on Computational Mechanics; 2006

United States Association of Computational Mechanics (USACM) and International Association of Computational Mechanics (IACM)

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. Important effects such as multiple blast wave reflections, the mach effect, rarefactions, and the negative phase of the blast wave can be readily modeled in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. Simplified analytical and semi-empirical techniques many times ignore such phenomena. Thus, modeling modern building sets in congested city centers usually requires the use of sophisticated CFD numerical calculations. In this paper, a numerical study is carried out about the dynamic loading generated by a blast loading in a congested urban environment such as the case of the AMIA (Israel-Argentina Mutual Association) building attack occurred in Buenos Aires, Argentina in July 1994. Additionally, a methodology to determine the location and mass of explosive in terrorit attacks when the location of the crater is unavailable is described.