Temporal and spatial pressure distribution of characteristics cylindrical shell structure under external surface burst explosion

Cylindrical shell structure, as a common structural shape in civil engineering, is widely used in military and civil infrastructure for protecting personnel, valuable equipment, and important resources. As these structures bear on people's livelihood and national security, they could easily become the targets of terrorist attacks, military attacks and chemical accidents. Predicting and assessing the damage degree that could be caused by a blast wave requires knowledge of the dynamic load imposed on the structure. Thus, studying the blast load has become the precondition of the work for achieving disaster prevention and reduction. Numerous empirical formulae and design manual are available in the literature to estimate the blast loading on an infinite plane target. Also, UFC-3-340-02 and previous studies only consider the blast effects on a rectangular structure positioned above the ground surface. Obviously, previous studies have assumed that the reflector is an ideal infinite or finite sized flat surface. However, cylindrical shell structure has a sharp curvature, which results in a complicated and variable incidence angle all over the whole structure under surface burst explosion. There is very less research work has been done to describe the blast wave propagation process on this type of structure. In this work, the wave diffraction behaviour on a cylindrical structure under surface burst explosion was investigated. Firstly, a numerical model based on the commercial software ANSYS/AUTODYN was developed and validated by relevant experimental results. Secondly, the influence of explosive and structural parameters on temporal and spatial overpressure distribution characteristics of cylindrical shell structure are discussed by parametric analysis. In addition, the performances of the Mach effect, reflected effect, shielding effect and clearing effect on the cylindrical shell were studied. The conclusion has a reference value for optimization design for cylindrical shell structure under explosion.