The Effect of Negative Pressure Phase in Blast Load Profile on Blast Wall of Offshore Plant Topside

Abstract

As a gas explosion is the most fatal accident in shipbuilding and offshore plant industries, all safety critical elements on the topside of offshore platforms should retain their integrity against blast pressure. Even though many efforts have been devoted to develop blast-resistant design methods in the offshore engineering field, there still remain several issues needed to be carefully investigated. From a procedure for calculation of explosion design pressure, impulse of a design pressure model having completely positive side only is determined by the absolute area of each obtained transient pressure response through the CFD analysis. The negative pressure phase in a general gas explosion, however, is often quite considerable unlike gaseous detonation or TNT explosion. The main objective of this study is to thoroughly examine the effect of the negative pressure phase on structural behavior. A blast wall for specific FPSO topside is selected to analyze structural response under the blast pressure. Because the blast wall is considered an essential structure for blast-resistant design. Pressure time history data were obtained by explosion simulations using FLACS, and the nonlinear transient finite element analyses were performed using LS-DYNA.