The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has invested significant effort in the development of engineering models to enhance the understanding of blast damage to the most common dam types in the U.S. Earlier studies performed by the Corps' Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) used 3-ft-tall model dam sections and smaller models to investigate damage to concrete gravity dams from underwater and water-surface detonations. This paper describes current work by ERDC to investigate blast damage from detonations on the crest and inside galleries. The study involves explosive experiments performed on a 1/30-scale model of a generic gravity dam. The experiments were instrumented at select locations, and the damage from each experiment was carefully documented. The experiments were accompanied by matching computer simulations that used first-principle numerical codes and constitutive models to accurately simulate dynamic loads and damage produced by the detonations. The results of the physical experiments were used to validate the numerical simulations, and both will be used to develop simplified but reliable methods to predict potential damage to gravity dams from explosive attacks.
展开▼
