An Overview of Missile Impact Tests on Steel-Plate Composite (SC) Walls

Conventional reinforced concrete (RC) structures have historically been the choice for blast and impact resistant structures. Experimentally validated equations to calculate the required wall thickness of RC walls to prevent scabbing and perforation exist and are included in NEI 07-13 and DOE-STD-3014-2006. Steel-plate composite (SC) walls consist of a concrete core sandwiched between two steel faceplates, and have recently been incorporated into power plant designs in several countries. The steel faceplates serve as reinforcement and formwork, which allows for modularization of the design and accelerated construction. SC walls inherently prevent scabbing and, based on the available experimental database, Bruhl et al. (2015) provided a three-step process to design SC walls to resist projectile perforation. This method was designed to be conservative based on a database of experimental and numerical investigations. This paper introduces an experimental program that was designed to further evaluate local impact behavior of SC walls, and confirm the design method. Several test have been planned to investigate the influence of parameters such as the faceplate thickness & strength, tie bar diameter & spacing, and projectile diameter, weight and velocity. This paper provides an overview of the experimental program and results from an initial set of tests. These preliminary results suggest that the experimental approach is promising.