Effect of Internal Blast on Steel Stud Walls

The effect of an internal blast on non-structural, gypsum clad steel stud walls is investigated through experiment and numerical models with the goal of understanding the pressure conditions in rooms adjacent to the blast. A better understanding of the failure mechanisms and pressure transmission characteristics of typical office building steel stud walls will lead to improved vulnerability assessments. Structural finite-element programs do reasonably well at predicting damage to structures due to blast if an incident pressure pulse is known. However, to accurately predict the dynamic response of light walls to an internal explosion and the resulting pressure conditions in adjacent rooms requires a coupled fluid dynamics – structural finite element program to capture the strongly coupled interaction of the fluid pressures and failing walls. For this investigation, the explicit, non-linear finite element program FLEX1 coupled to the GEMINI 2computational fluid dynamics code was used for the numerical simulations. Three large-scale experimental tests were conducted in a shock tube to provide controlled simulations of two blast sizes including wall configurations both with and without a door. These tests were used to validate the high-fidelity coupled numerical model. Close agreement was obtained between the experimental and numerical tests for both wall response and transmitted pressure. Subsequent numerical simulations were conducted to investigate steel stud wall response and adjacent room pressures due to three-dimensional blasts.