Handbook for Blast Resistant Design of Buildings


Handbook for Blast-Resistant Design of Buildings

HANDBOOK FOR

BLAST-RESISTANT

DESIGN OF BUILDINGS

Edited by Donald 0. Dusenberry

Copyright 0 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Edited by

Donald O. Dusenberry





PREFACE

The need for protection against the effects of explosions is not new. The use

of explosive weaponry by the military necessitated resistive entrenchments ages

ago. Industrialization of our societies well over a century ago meant that we

intended to manufacture, store, handle, and use explosives in constructive ways.

To support these military and industrial purposes, a relatively small group of

designers have worked to devise ways to strengthen the blast resistance of our

structures.

Early attempts at blast-resistance design necessarily relied on judgment, test,

and trial-and-error construction to find the best solutions. As technology improved,

designers became better able to predict the influences of explosions

and the resistive responses that they strove to impart into their designs. More

recently, in the past several decades chemists, physicists, blast consultants, and

structural engineers have been empowered by technologies and computational

tools that have enhanced the precision of their analyses and the efficiency of their

designs.

At the same time, the need has increased. The small contingent of designers

skilled in the art and science of creating structural designs that will resist explosive

forces has been joined by a larger group of architects, engineers, blast

consultants, and security consultants who are trying to respond to the increasing

concern from a broader group of clients who fear an exposure that they did

not anticipate before and frequently did not bring upon themselves. Consultants

who have never before had to assess risks, devise risk-reduction programs, provide

security systems, establish design-base threats, calculate the pressures and

impulses from explosions, and create cost-effective structural designs are being

thrust into the process. Many are ill-trained to respond.

There are several good references on some of the aspects of designing for

blast resistance. Some of these references support military purposes or for other

reasons have government-imposed restrictions against dissemination. As such,

they are not widely available to consultants working in the private sector. Nearly

all those references and the references that are public each treat an aspect of

blast phenomenology, security systems, and structural design for blast resistance,

but few, if any, bring together in one place discussions of the breadth of the

issues that are important for competent designs. Consultants are forced to collect

a library of references and extract from each the salient information that they

then synthesize into a comprehensive design approach.


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