Numerical study of blast performance of concrete filled double-steel-plate composite walls

Abstract

Currently, terrorism attack is one of the main concerns in public safety, although the probability of such attack is fairly low. From the perspective of multi-hazard mitigation, it is expected that the structural members that are used to resist earthquakes or winds in buildings should also reduce the vulnerability to blast. Concrete filled double-steel-plate composite walls are one of the novel structural members which are used as shear walls, in which concrete is filled between two steel plates and connected to them through shear studs. In this article, finite-element-based analyses were carried out to investigate the dynamic behaviour of concrete filled double-steel-plate composite walls subjected to blast loading. A three-dimensional numerical model was developed and validated based on previously published experimental results. Then, the numerical models were employed to investigate the effects of axial compression ratio, concrete strength, wall thickness and shear connector spacing on the blast performance of concrete filled double-steel-plate composite walls under different blast intensities. The results show that axial compression has both positive and negative effects on the blast performance of concrete filled double-steel-plate composite walls. The positive effect prevails due to increased effective flexural stiffness when plastic deformation under zero axial compression and the same blast load is marginal, whereas the negative effect is more dominant due to P-delta effect when evident plastic deformation occurs under zero axial compression and the same blast load.