Assessment of Impulse and Pressure Wave Distribution on Realistic City Models

Abstract

As the level of threat in urban settings regarding terrorist incidents increase, it becomes a necessity to develop advanced methodologies to enhance the security level. A bombing attack, which is a widely used method by the terrorists, creates extreme loading conditions on the surrounding buildings. Therefore, to be able to design more resilient and durable structures, it’s necessary to estimate these loading conditions that occur as the result of a bombing attack. “MAPEX†is the acronym for the European Union CIPS Project that stands for “Probabilistic damage-mapping development tools for urban critical infrastructures against terrorist attacksâ€, and its general aim is to generate probabilistic damage-mapping methodologies for the estimation, investigation and the optimization of the security level of urban critical infrastructures against explosive attacks. These methodologies will have important functions such as, estimating risks to the facilities, investigating explosive attacks and providing help for the planning of crisis management and evacuation protocols [1]. As a part of the “MAPEX†Project, five urban scenarios using five city models which are parts of city of Munich, Germany have first been modeled on a computer environment, and then using various amounts of TNT and stand-off distances, explosion simulations have been conducted and the results have been post-processed. For the modeling, Ansys- DesignModeler®; and for the simulations, Ansys-Autodyn® hypercode have been used. After conducting the simulations, the pressure vs time and the impulse vs time data have been obtained for the previously defined gauge points.