Abstract
In the last decades; the mass destructive weapons had been widely used like nuclear
weapons. Nuclear bombs are destructive tool for human, weapons, equipment and all
facilities. The development of the nuclear bomb is a challenge for civil engineer s to protect
people, facilities and weapons against hazards of nuclear explosions. That led them to use
the protective structures in military and civilian applications like underground concrete
structures. It is difficult and sophisticated to use experimental nuclear test to predict
behavior of buried concrete structure response.
The present paper presents a study to understand the behavior of underground concrete
structure box section under blast load. Blast load resulted from a 2.0 kt (kiloton) "weapon
yield" explodes at 200 m horizontal distance from the concrete structure , while the "weapon
yield" is the measure of nuclear weapon, usually in kilotons or megatons of TNT equivalent .
Numerical models were conducted using a 3-D nonlinear finite element program
(AUTODYN).
For saving time, an equivalent weapon yield of 0.03125 kt explodes at 50 m range after
ensuring that the pressure resulted is the same, using the well known "Scaling Law"
R/R1=(W/W1)⅓ , where R and R1 are the ranges of charges W and W1 respectively.
Different mitigation material; half pyramid sandwich panel, honeycomb sandwich panel
and aluminum foam were used to increase the resistance of underground concrete structure.
This paper proposed also the best thickness of half pyramid sandwich panel under
pressure ranges between 345 kpa to 1172 kpa (50 psi to 170 psi) namely 345, 552,758, 965
and 1172 kpa.