Air-blast Analyses in Urban Areas

The damage to buildings in an urban area from conventional weapons and improvised explosive devices is of great concern for vulnerability studies. One major concern is the air blast propagation in an urban area, with local building geometry strongly influencing the air blast's pressure-time history due to the reflection of the blast wave within the urban area. An accurate determination of the structural response of a building subjected to an air blast loading from a high explosive detonation requires a great effort, since models for both air blast propagation and structural response needs to be verified. Three-dimensional CFD models were used to study the blast propagation from a 210 kg TNT charge in three urban area geometries, i.e. regular building placement, irregular building placement and a building geometry with an open space in the centre. The Overture partial differential equation (PDE) solver evaluated within an earlier study was used for these simulations.