Assessment of Blast Loading Courtesy Karen Riddette,
WorleyParsons (Sydney, Australia) Like the U.S., Australia has
recently found itself subject to increased threat of terrorism,
resulting in greater importance being placed on the security of
public buildings and facilities. Also the proper storage of
explosive materials requires an understanding of the likely
effects of an accidental blast. WorleyParsons has used FLOW-3D
to examine how blast loadings are affected by complex building
geometries, and determine the effectiveness of blast mitigation
solutions. Based on a large bank of historical test data, the
U.S. Army has generated a series of empirical curves that can be
used to calculate blast overpressures at a particular distance
from the ground zero. See Figures 1 and 2. A blast wave consists
of an initial pressure peak, which then decays back to
atmospheric pressure, and into the sub-atmospheric ‘negative
phase’. These values are for a ‘side-on’ pressure – for
reflected waves from buildings, the peak pr