Assessment of a Simplified Methodology for Preliminary Blast-Resistant Design of Insulated Precast Concrete Wall Panels

Abstract A Blast loading history can be represented by the peak pressure value and the impulse. Combinations of pressure and impulse of various blast loading scenarios can be collected to draw a pressure-impulse (P-I) curve that corresponds to a level of damage of a blast-resistant structural component. The P-I curve is typically used for a preliminary design or assessment of blast resistance structural components. Generating a P I curve for a given structural component and level of protection requires repeatedly ru nning a single degree of freedom system (SDOF) model, which can be tedious for early design stages. Hence, a simplified approach (i.e., the normalization approach) was utilized to promptly generate the P- I curve for insulated precast concrete wall panels, which relies on shifting a control P I curve using normalization factors. The generated P-I curves using the normalization approach are validated with the traditional SDOF approach curves; 95% of the examined insulted panel configurations have an error between +/-7%. As a result of the reached low error percentages, a spreadsheet- design tool was developed using this approach. The tool can further enable rapid evaluation of the performance of insulated precast concrete panels under blast loading during the preliminary design phase.