Civil Engineering Association

HANDBOOK FOR BLAST-RESISTANT DESIGN OF BUILDINGS

The need for protection against the effects of explosions is not new. The use of explosive weaponry by the military necessitated resistive entrenchments ages ago. Industrialization of our societies well over a century ago meant that we intended to manufacture, store, handle, and use explosives in constructive ways. To support these military and industrial purposes, a relatively small group of designers have worked to devise ways to strengthen the blast resistance of our structures.
Early attempts at blast-resistance design necessarily relied on judgment, test, and trial-and-error construction to fin the best solutions. As technology improved, designers became better able to predict the influence of explosions and the resistive responses that they strove to impart into their designs. More recently, in the past several decades chemists, physicists, blast consultants, and structural engineers have been empowered by technologies and computational tools that have enhanced the precision of their analyses and the efficien y of their designs.
At the same time, the need has increased. The small contingent of designers skilled in the art and science of creating structural designs that will resist explosive forces has been joined by a larger group of architects, engineers, blast consultants, and security consultants who are trying to respond to the increasing concern from a broader group of clients who fear an exposure that they did not anticipate before and frequently did not bring upon themselves. Consultants who have never before had to assess risks, devise risk-reduction programs, provide security systems, establish design-base threats, calculate the pressures and impulses from explosions, and create cost-effective structural designs are being thrust into the process. Many are ill-trained to respond. There are several good references on some of the aspects of designing for blast resistance. Some of these references support military purposes or for other reasons have government-imposed restrictions against dissemination. As such, they are not widely available to consultants working in the private sector. Nearly all those references and the references that are public each treat an aspect of blast phenomenology, security systems, and structural design for blast resistance, but few, if any, bring together in one place discussions of the breadth of the issues that are important for competent designs. Consultants are forced to collect a library of references and extract from each the salient information that they then synthesize into a comprehensive design approach.