Numerical Study on Impulse Reduction Performance of Protective Barriers Made of Steel Posts
Publication: Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 146, Issue 10
Abstract
Protective barriers are frequently used to protect buildings and their inhabitants from blast and vehicle impact. This paper presents numerical investigations of the impulse reduction performance of protective barriers made of steel posts. To explore the overpressure reduction behind the barriers, the authors presented numerical *LOAD_BLAST_ENHANCED–Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (LBE-ALE) models in a previous study, which combine the advantages of both the empirical method (via the keyword LBE) and the ALE method. These models were modified in this study to provide an accurate prediction of the maximum impulses, which were further used to evaluate the impulse reduction performance of the barriers. They were validated against the impulse data measured in the experiments. It is demonstrated that Barrier Configuration M1 containing eight posts achieves the best performance in reducing the maximum impulse among all the tested barrier configurations. The net impulse reduction is as high as 22.9%, compared to the reference configuration Mref without posts. Additionally, some important observations were made from parametric studies, in which the validated numerical LBE-ALE models were utilized to analyze the influence of diverse parameters on the impulse reduction performance of the barriers, i.e., the number and cross section of posts in the single-layer arrangements as well as the number of layers in the multilayer arrangements.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance, Department II.5—Structural Protection, Emergency Preparedness (Water) in Germany for the financial support to carry out this research work. The authors would also like to thank the Bundeswehr Technical Center for Protective and Special Technologies (WTD52) in Germany for conducting the experiments.
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Published In
Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 146 • Issue 10 • October 2020
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 20, 2019
Accepted: Apr 17, 2020
Published online: Jul 17, 2020
Published in print: Oct 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Dec 17, 2020
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