Forward to special issue on blast and impact of engineering structures

Abstract

The blast and impact behaviour of structures are dependent on many factors, such as the type of loading and the behaviour of constituent materials at high strain rates. Blast can be defined as a large scale, rapid and sudden release of energy. For example, in physical explosions, energy may be released from the catastrophic failure of a pressure vessel, or from the chemical interaction of two or more liquids. Structural impact deals with the behaviour of structures and components subjected to large dynamic loads involving contact, which could be the outcome, for example, of a high velocity projectile or a high speed crash. The prediction of the effect of a blast load on a structure is an important step in designing advanced blast protective structures. Blast energy is released within a very short period of time, which can be less than 1ms, making it challenging for protection material to absorb a majority of the blast energy. For blast impact analysis, the complexity of the problem can be attributed to the high speed wave front propagation, the flow of materials under these conditions, and the large structural deformation. Researchers are actively pursuing all these issues related to blast and impact analysis and means of developing protection against blast and impact forces. Since an explosion is a hypervelocity impact, numerical simulation is an attractive method to