A fast-running engineering tool for assessing structural vulnerability to blast loading

Abstract

Assessing the vulnerability of a platform is crucial in its design. In fact, the results obtained from vulnerability analyses provide valuable information, leading to precise design choices or corrective solutions that enhance the platform's chances of surviving different scenarios. Such scenarios can involve various types of threats that can affect the platform's survivability. Among such, blast waves impacting the platform's structure represent critical conditions that have not yet been studied in detail. That is, frameworks for vulnerability assessment that can deal with blast loading have not been presented yet. In this context, this work presents a fast-running engineering tool that can quantify the risk that a structure fails when it is subjected to blast loading from the detonation of high explosive-driven threats detonating at various distances from the structure itself. The tool has been implemented in an in-house software that calculates vulnerability to various impacting objects, and its capabilities have been shown through a simplified, yet realistic, case study. The novelty of this research lies in the development of an integrated computational environment capable of calculating the platform's vulnerability to blast waves, without the need for running expensive finite element simulations. In fact, the proposed tool is fully based on analytical models integrated with a probabilistic approach for vulnerability calculation.