Next Generation Blast Protection Technologies and Combined Blast and CBRN Protection Technologies

Various procedures have been proposed for evaluation/mitigation of the potential for progressive collapse in the design and/or retrofit process. These range from passive procedures that evaluate the redundancy of structures to limit failure through redistribution of gravitation loads after key elements such as columns have been removed to complete nonlinear finite element analyses of buildings subjected to potential explosive threats. The capability to perform rapid, accurate determination of whether a building will undergo progressive collapse after being attacked is still under development. Under TSWG sponsorship, Weidlinger Associates, Inc. (WAI) developed a procedure for rapid assessment of reinforced concrete and steel moment frame structures for progressive collapse. This was implemented into a design/evaluation tool called ProCAT applicable for this limited subset of structures. No full scale experimental validation of this tool or any other progressive collapse approach has been conducted because full scale testing of multi-bay, multi-story structures is excessively expensive. We propose to expand upon the PROCAT technology to incorporate detailed behavior of structural joints and connections for reinforced concrete and steel structures while demonstrating that small-scale testing can be used to economically and accurately validate the underlying first principles finite element computations and the resulting fast running tool.