Review on quick safety assessment of building structures in complex urban environment after extreme explosion events

Abstract

Extreme explosion events result in demands for emergency rescue service. From the civil engineering perspective, a quick safety assessment of building structures in the explosion’s vicinity will provide the emergency rescue committee with concrete support to make scientific decisions. In this paper, three primary issues, namely, inverse analysis of explosive characteristics, blast wave propagation in complex urban areas and blast-induced damage identification, are reviewed. These are often performed stepwise and form a multi-step whole to assist the emergency rescue service. The paper begins by introducing the inverse analysis of explosives based on craters, building damages and seismic or acoustic records. In this step, explosive characteristics, for example, charge type, original time, yield and location, could be produced and input into blast load calculation in the next step. Then, the existing literature on blast wave propagation and blast load determination is presented with close attention to complex urban environments. It shows that the current study remains in its infancy and relies on advancement in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Besides, pressure–impulse (P-I) diagrams which predict the structural damage based on the calculated blast loads are illustrated. Onsite damage detection techniques, such as visual inspection, non-destructive testing (NDT) and vibration-based methods, are also discussed. The paper ends with a discussion of the shortcomings of previous work and the outlooks of further work.