Detailing Structural Concrete for Blast Containment
Abstract
Reinforced concrete structures must often be designed to resist short duration, high amplitude, dynamic loads. These loads may arise from a wide range of sources, including industrial or military explosions, vehicle impact, dropped objects, or wave impact on marine structures. The recent terrorist actions against public buildings in London, New York City, Buenos Aires and Oklahoma City caused various combinations of structural damage and casualties, highlighting that designers may need also to consider loads from deliberate attack. All these realistic cases illustrate the great need for technical information to be used for enhancing structural protection. Unfortunately, current civilian design procedures usually do not explicitly address these issues. However, considerable information on this subject can be found in several references (1-8). There has been a strong international research activity over the last five decades in the general area of short duration dynamic effects on structures. Initially, such work was mostly empirical; however, in recent years, more fundamental research has been undertaken. These studies have shown that short duration, high magnitude loading conditions and the associated inertial effects have a major influence on the response. These loads are typically applied to structures at rates approximately 1000 times faster than earthquake-induced loads, and the frequencies of the structural response are much higher than those induced by conventional loads. Further, short duration dynamic loads often exhibit strong spatial and time variations, resulting in sharp stress gradients in the structure. High strain rates also affect the strength and ductility of concrete and steel, the bond stress-slip relationship for reinforcement, the failure modes, and the fracture/failure toughness of the structure.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 1996
- Accession Number
- ADA502958
Entities
People
- C. Canada
- H. Nickerson
- T. Krauthammer
Organizations
- Pennsylvania State University