Comparison of two conventional analytical techniques such as X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) for measuring Pb concentrations in soil samples was achieved using field and laboratory work. Seventy-three samples were collected from urban areas surrounding the large lead smelter at South Australia, as an indicator of the environment impact of smelter activity. Soil Pb concentrations were determined using hand-held XRF analyser under laboratory conditions. ICP-MS analysis on digested soils (using a microwave-assisted nitric acid digestion-extraction) was applied to validate p-XRF data. The analysis showed that Pb concentrations determined by XRF correlated with high linearity with Pb concentrations determined by ICP-MS measurements (R 2 = 0.89). Statistical test (t test) was applied to the data of both methods applied without any significant difference between the two techniques. These results indicated that ICP-MS corroborated XRF for Pb soil measurements and suggests that XRF was a reliable and quick alternative to traditional analytical methods in studies of environmental health risk assessment, allowing for much larger sampling regimes in relatively shorter times and could be applied in the field.

In this study, the Performance Based Design PBD method, which has been used only in seismic design by several codes, has been expanded to be applied to structures exposed to blast loads.The plastic hinge models used in PBD, which currently available for earthquake loads do not represent real behavior under the blast load. An analytical approach was proposed to represent the plastic behavior of flexural response under blast loads. The proposed model considers the following essential phenomena: concrete cover crushing, concrete core crushing, bar buckling in compression reinforcement, strain hardening in tensile reinforcement and softening in reinforcement bar. The proposed analytical approach has been validated with two experimental results of columns applied to blast loads and reasonable results has been seen KEYWORDS: Performance Based Design PBD, plastic hinge, concrete cover crushing, concrete core crushing, bar buckling, blast loads, nonlinear dynamic analysis. ASCE 41-13 PLASTIC HINGE MODEL VALIDATION UNDER BLAST LOADSASCE 41-13, 2013 assumed that the nonlinear load-deformation relation is based on experimental evidence or taken from specified tables showing deformation limits. The typical ASCE 41-13 load-deformation relation is shown in Fig. 1, where deformations are expressed using terms, such as strain, curvature, rotation or elongation. Generally, the typical plastic hinge model is described by Modeling Parameters MPs and Acceptance Criteria (Ghannoum. W. M., 2014). The parameters (a) and (b), which can be found from ASCE 41-13 refer to post-yield deformation or plastic deformation. When the load-deformation relation is used to express the flexural response, it is given as moment-rotation relation for the plastic hinge at a section.