Behavior and Design of Standard Wide-Flange Steel Columns Subjected to Near-Field Detonations: Fid-Bau Portal

Behavior and Design of Standard Wide-Flange Steel Columns Subjected to Near-Field Detonations

Kim, Yongwook / Florio, Salvatore / Wang, Qian

Demands to incorporate blast loading in building structural designs have increased recently. Focus has been placed on far-field detonations based on large charge weights in the development of approaches to blast mitigation designs. However, more recently, frequent attacks using lighter and portable devices detonated very closely to targets have occurred. There are increasing concerns about the destruction of a few critical structural members due to near-field detonations, which potentially can lead to a more substantial collapse of a building. Although there are approaches to analyzing structural frames after removal of a few columns, there currently are no design codes or specifications to determine whether the columns actually would collapse when subjected to near-field detonations. Therefore this study identified the failure or damage characteristics of standard wide-flange steel columns subjected to near-field detonations, performed a series of numerical analyses to develop simple design tools and charts, and provides details of nonlinear explicit finite-element analysis that can be followed by practicing engineers. A total of 369 numerical models were built to cover a wide variety of standard wide-flange steel columns subjected to a range of portable charge weights detonated at realistically close proximity with and without service loads. The developed design charts can be used by practicing engineers for preliminary design, cost-estimate, or quality control purposes prior to performing detailed finite-element analyses. The numerical models used to develop these design charts were verified using experimental results available in the literature.