The calculation of loads on buildings and structures caused by outdoor explosions of the fuel-air mixture

Introduction. An important engineering task, to be solved in the process of designing buildings and structures for hazardous industrial facilities, is to determine values of loads caused by outdoor explosions of the fuel-air mixture. Nowadays software packages, that use the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach, are widely applied in the design practice to assess various effects on building structures. In this regard, it is necessary to develop a load calculation method, that employs numerical simulation, and verify it in comparison with the experimental data.

Goals and objectives. The purpose of this work is to use the method of computational fluid dynamics to analyze external sympathetic detonation loads on various types of buildings and structures.

The body of the article. The article addresses the “compressed balloon” method used to analyze loads, caused by outdoor explosions of gas. Dependencies, proposed in the article, are needed to set the input data and make numerical calculations using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique. The numerical modeling of various experiments in the ANSYS Fluent software package was conducted. The authors compared the results of numerical modeling and standard engineering methods with various experiments to assess the accuracy of the “compressed balloon” method used to analyze an outdoor detonation explosion.

Conclusions. The authors have proven the qualitative and quantitative convergence of the numerical model of blast wave propagation and the experimental data. This calculation method allows to accurately apply the pressure profile to any surface of a building or structure in the course of an outdoor detonation explosion and estimate the bearing capacity of building structures. The proposed method can be used in the design of buildings or structures that feature various configurations.

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