Enhanced Single‐Degree‐of‐Freedom Analysis of Thin Elastic Plates Subjected to Blast Loading Using an Energy‐Based Approach

Abstract

Single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) models are known to represent a valid tool in support of design. Key assumptions of these models, on the other hand, can strongly affect the expected predictions, hence resulting in possible overconservative or misleading estimates for the response of real structural systems under extreme actions. Among others, the description of the input loads can be responsible for major design issues, thus requiring the use of more refined approaches. In this paper, a SDOF model is developed for thin elastic plates under large displacements. Based on the energy approach, careful attention is given for the derivation of the governing linear and nonlinear parameters, under different boundary conditions of technical interest. In doing so, the efforts are dedicated to the description of the incoming blast waves. In place of simplified sinusoidal pressures, the input impulsive loads are described with the support of infinite trigonometric series that are more accurate. The so-developed SDOF model is therefore validated, based on selected literature results, by analyzing the large displacement response of thin elastic plates, under several boundary conditions and real blast pressures. Major advantage for the validation of the proposed SDOF model is obtained from experimental finite element (FE) and finite difference (FD) models of literature, giving evidence of a rather good correlation and confirming the validity of the presented formulation.

An Efficient Reliability-Based Approach for Evaluating Safe Scaled Distance of Steel Columns under Dynamic Blast Loads

“…Bao and Li [18] focused on the residual axial capacity of square RC columns, while the study in [19] was dedicated to H-section steel columns. A number of numerical investigations used equivalent SDOF systems and FE for primary members [16,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. Besides, the uncertainty of input variables for blast load parameters and material properties (but also geometrical parameters and FE modelling errors [33]) can severely affect the predicted structural response.…”