Weapons Effects FRMs for Reinforced Concrete Walls & Floor/Ceiling Slabs

A nine-month Phase I project is proposed to demonstrate the feasibility of developing high-fidelity physics-based (HFPB) weapons effects FRMs for reinforced concrete walls and floor/ceiling slabs to meet current AFRL requirements.  Modeling issues for both hardened bunkers and non-hardened conventional structures will be investigated, including constitutive models for high strength concrete and expansion of the load space and for hardened structures, and techniques for modeling connections in non-monolithic conventional structures.  Techniques for more efficient FRMs will be investigated and demonstrated for both types of structures.  FRMs will model failure due to weapons effects, residual capacity of non-failed components, as well as breach, spall and secondary debris for assessing collateral damage. BENEFIT: These FRMs are being developed to replace the simplistic models in AFRLs MEVA and EF codes that are used to support weapon design and effectiveness assessment.  In addition to improving the physics modeling fidelity of the codes, the accuracy of the FRMs is rigorously quantified by comparison with HFPB analyses and test data, adding confidence to the assessments.  These FRMs will complete the suite of new HFPB FRMs in MEVA, allowing greater precision in the assessment of vulnerability to current and future air-delivered weapons.  These models and variants of them will be commercialized for use within other branches of military service, as well as non-military government and civil structures applications.