5. Assessment of explosion actions on structures

5.1 Preamble

The preceding paragraphs describe the various methods available for estimating free-field overpressures following an explosion. However, the values thus determined are not directly applicable to structural design.

This is because the flow of the pressure wave is strongly disturbed in the vicinity of obstacles, and the pressure loading actually applied to a structure is significantly different from that in the free field. It is therefore necessary to characterize the interaction of the wave with the obstacles in order to obtain calculation actions that can be used for dimensioning.

Only the numerical methods (CFD) described above can take direct account of obstacles and thus directly obtain explosion actions on structures,...