• Explosives and Blasting
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.73-92
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• 2023

With the increase of risk of gas explosion, various methods for indirectly estimating the explosion paramaters, which are required for the prediction of gas explosion scale and impact. In this study, the characteristics of the most frequently used methods such as TNT equivalent method, TNO multi-energy method, and BST method and the processes for determining the parameters of the methods were compared. In the case of TNT equivalent method, an adequate selection of the efficiency factor for various conditions such as the type of vapor cloud explosion and explosion material is needed. There is no objective guidelines for the selection of class number in TNO multi-energy method and it is not possible to estimate negative overpressure. It was found that there were some mistakes in the reported parameter values and suggested corrected values. BST method provides more detailed guidelines for the estimation of the explosion parameters including negative overpressure, but the graphs used in this methods are not clear. In order to overcome the problem, the graphs were redrawn. A more convenient estimation of explosion parameters with the numerical expression of the redrawn graphs will be available in the future.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.193-212
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• 2009

The resilience of a city confronted with a terrorist bomb attack is the background of the paper. The resilience strongly depends on vital infrastructure and the physical protection of people. The protection buildings provide in case of an external explosion is one of the important elements in safety assessment. Besides the aspect of protection, buildings facilitate and enable many functions, e.g., offices, data storage, -handling and -transfer, energy supply, banks, shopping malls etc. When a building is damaged, the loss of functions is directly related to the location, amount of damage and the damage level. At TNO Defence, Security and Safety methods are developed to quantify the resilience of city infrastructure systems (Weerheijm et al. 2007b). In this framework, the dynamic response, damage levels and residual bearing capacity of multi-storey RC buildings is studied. The current paper addresses the aspects of dynamic response and progressive collapse, as well as the proposed method to relate the structural damage to a volume-damage parameter, which can be linked to the loss of functionality. After a general introduction to the research programme and progressive collapse, the study of the dynamic response and damage due to blast loading for a single RC element is described. Shock tube experiments on plates are used as a reference to study the possibilities of engineering methods and an explicit finite element code to quantify the response and residual bearing capacity. Next the dynamic response and progressive collapse of a multi storey RC building is studied numerically, using a number of models. Conclusions are drawn on the ability to predict initial blast damage and progressive collapse. Finally the link between the structural damage of a building and its loss of functionality is described, which is essential input for the envisaged method to quantify the resilience of city infrastructure.