Abstract Summary
The blast-resistant design of buildings has been of interest for decades, in petrochemical industry, military, legal courts, nuclear reactors, embassies and other vital facilities. Reliable analysis procedures have been established to determine the response of those buildings to a well-defined blast load. The overpressure caused by a hemispherical open-air explosion of a certain amount of TNT equivalents can be readily determined from literature. The reflected and side-on pressure and impulse are primary inputs for the blast-resistant design of buildings. That design can be more economical if barriers and terrain elevations are accounted for or provided. However, the effects of barriers and terrain elevations are not easily accessible in literature and consequently it is difficult to include in analyses. The influence must be estimated in practice, computed numerically, or neglected. In this present paper a series of hemispherical open-air explosions in geometrical configurations with barriers and elevations is addressed computationally with dedicated CFD software. Investigation of the results leads to a straightforward dependency of blast design parameters on geometrical parameters such as the scaled distances from the blast source to the obstacle or elevation and the building, as well as the height of the obstacle. The blast parameters can then be determined for future analyses based on the dependencies determined for this study. This can be considered as a practical supplement to the existing literature about open air explosions, as it reduces the need for numerical analysis to determine the blast parameters in a range of configurations with barriers and terrain elevations.
