Review of two methods for calculating explosive Air blast

Abstract

Blast profiles and two primary methods of determining them are reviewed for use in the creation of a computer program for calculating blast pressures, which serves as a design tool to aid engineers or analysts in the study of structures subjected to explosive air blast. These methods were integrated into the computer program BLAST.F to generate air blast pressure profiles by one of two methods, that of the Army's Explosions in Air manual and a method outlined by Kingery and Bulmash in their work. These methods were compared after the creation of the program and can conservatively model the effects of spherical air blast and hemispherical surface burst. The code BLAST.F was used in conjunction with a commercial finite element code (NASTRAN) in a demonstration of method on a 30 by 30-inch aluminum 2519 quarter plate of fixed boundary conditions in hemispherical ground burst and showed good convergence with 256 elements for deflection and good agreement in equivalent stresses of a point near the blast between the 256 and 1024 element examples. Application of blasts to a hypothetical wing composed of aluminum 7075-T6 was also conducted showing good versatility of method for using this program with other finite element models.