KARAGOZIAN & CASE, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: The disintegration of overloaded walls and slabs generates two important secondary effects

Description

The disintegration of overloaded walls and slabs generates two important secondary effects that can be lethal to personnel, equipment, and structural components located in adjoining rooms; the first is secondary debris from fragmentation of the wall/slab component and the second is secondary air blast that can, in many circumstances, interact with the disintegrating wall and project blast and dynamic pressure loadings. Current HFPB FRMs that are used to predict weapons effectiveness or assess human or building lethality do not account for these effects. The DoD needs a new generation of FRMs to improve their prediction capabilities in these areas. The overall goal of this project is to develop HFPB FRMs to simulate the effects of air-delivered weapons against building structures and the resulting structural response, disintegration of the structure and projection of structural debris and secondary air blast into adjoining spaces. The models will consider the structural types and materials typical of Air Force targets, current and future weapons in the Air Force"s arsenal, and function within the framework of AFRL"s L & V codes. The predictive accuracy of the models will be quantified, based on comparisons with experimental data and HFPB calculations. BENEFIT: The anticipated results of Phase I are a set of HFPB approaches that can be used to compute physically-based representation of secondary debris and secondary air blast for FRM development. The results of the Phase I will place K & C in a position to identify a plan for additional research and FRM model development. The Phase I studies, which include feasibility demonstrations of the analytical approaches, are then a key step to providing a foundation for the research and development efforts to be performed in Phase II and beyond, where we plan to develop them into useable tools. The blast effects modeling and protective design industry is also a growing market that is devoting millions of dollars for R & D and to develop a better understanding of blast effects, the damage imparted to structural components and the risks of collapse this engenders in structural systems such as those used in buildings, bridges, dams, etc. Development of stochastic based analysis methods will be of great interest not only to the U.S. military in developing better attack strategies and defensive protective designs, but also in anti-terrorist and anti-insurgent efforts around the world to enable a more efficient means of identifying the vulnerabilities of structural and mechanical systems and components. The protective design community, especially related to anti-terrorist, anti-insurgent protection industries have a marked potential to benefit from the new methods proposed herein. Finally, because the modeling techniques we seek to develop are to be based on stochastic principles, they could be deployed for other structural analyses problems and materials characterizations where uncertainties are a dominate element in determining behaviors. Thus industries including aerospace and biomedical industries could potentially benefit from the methods developed in this effort.