Near-field blast loading : challenges, unknowns, and opportunities

Near-field loading presents a considerable challenge to the blast protection engineering community. Here, pressure loads can be well in excess of material strengths, and they rapidly decay with both distance and time, resulting in incredibly short duration, highly concentrated loads. Until recently, physical measurements of near-field blast loading were not possible, and as such the tools that have been developed (both to predict the loading and to subsequently design structures and systems subjected to this loading) are not informed by direct observation and are of unknown validity and accuracy. Dr Rigby and colleagues in the Blast and Impact Research Group at the University of Sheffield have developed experimental apparatus to directly measure near-field loading distributions.

This talk presents some findings from ongoing studies in this area. In particular, it focuses on exploring some experimental insights which have shed light on the complex behaviour in the immediate vicinity of an explosive detonation, consequences for structural response, and advanced data-driven machine learning methods to predict this.