• UTRC II SUBMISSION SYSTEM
  • Careers
  • Contact
  • Login / Register

Search form

Home
  • Home
  • About
    • Welcome to the UTRC Site
    • Theme
    • Staff
    • Board of Directors
    • Press
    • Annual Report
    • Program Progress Performance Report
    • Newsletter
  • Research
    • Projects
    • RFPs
    • Submit Your Proposal
    • Funding Categories
      • UTRC Research Initiative
      • UTRC Advanced Technology Initiative
      • UTRC Faculty Development Mini-grants
      • UTRC Best Transportation Paper Competition
      • News
  • Publications
  • Directory
    • Consortium Universities
    • Partners
    • Principal Investigators
    • Staff
    • Board of Directors
  • Education
    • Where to Study
    • Transportation and Planning Doctoral Series
    • AITE Scholarships
    • UTRC Dissertation Grants
    • Summer Institute
    • September 11th Memorial Program
    • Technology Transfer and Training
    • Online Graduate Certificate Program
    • UTRC Travel Grants
    • Student Award Recipients
    • Apply For Scholarships
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
    • Visiting Scholar Seminar Series
  • Resources

Approach to Blast Resistant Design of Aging Transportation Structures with Little or No Stand-Off Distance

Considerations to blast loading by potential terrorist attacks have been increased in structural designs since September 11. Essential government and transportation facilities as well as symbolic private sector buildings have been targets of terrorists. Publicly available approaches to designing structures against blast loadings are not suitable for such urban structures, because the approaches were developed mainly for military projects, in which certain stand-off distances can be maintained from publicly open streets. Due to congested nature of urban environment, essential structural members are often exposed to the public with little or no stand-off distances. For this reason, the analysis to design urban structures against blast loading should be performed differently with a detonation with little or no stand-off distances. State-of-the-art software packages are useful to analyze blast effects on urban structures. However, they are not commonly used in structural design offices, because numerical modeling and simulation using the software are time-consuming and not practically affordable.

The purpose of this exploratory research is to develop a novel simplified approach for blast analysis and design of steel structures with little or no stand-off distances for use by general structural engineers without access to the sophisticated software. The main focus of this study is on the riveted built-up shapes that are commonly used in aging urban transportation structures. A series of numerical simulations will be performed and used to quantify damage levels of structural members subjected to blast loads. The simulations will be based on detailed nonlinear explicit dynamic analyses for investigation of high-intensity and short-duration blast effects on structures using a fully coupled interaction technique between computational fluid and structural dynamics. Parametric studies of such analysis would result in certain patterns, which will then be used to develop quantifiable damage curves or equations of steel members for efficient mitigation design.

Project Details

Project Type: 
Emerging Investigators Program
Project Dates: 
September 1, 2016 to February 28, 2018
Principal Investigators: 
Yongwook Kim
Qian Wang
Institution: 
Manhattan College
Sponsor(s): 
University Transportation Research Center (UTRC)
Project Status: 
Active
Please subscribe to our Newsletter:

Get our newsletter

Please enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:

Contact Us

University Transportation Research Center
Marshak Hall - Science Building, Suite 910 
The City College of New York
138th Street & Convent Avenue ,New York, NY 10031