Reliability of underground concrete barriers against normal missile impact

Abstract

In the present paper, a methodology has been presented for the reliability assessment of concrete barriers that lie at a certain depth in the soil, and a missile (a rigid projectile) impacts the top of the soil cover normally, and subsequently after penetrating the soil cover completely it hits the barrier with certain striking velocity. For this purpose, using expressions available in the literature, striking velocity of missile at any depth of soil has been derived and then expressions for the depths of penetration in crater and tunnel region of concrete barrier have been deduced. These depths of penetration have been employed for the derivation of limit state functions. Using the derived limit state functions reliability assessment of underground concrete barrier has then been carried out through First Order Reliability Method (FORM). To study the influence of various random variables on barrier reliability, sensitivity analysis has also been carried out. In addition, a number of parametric studies is conducted to obtain the results of practical interest.