Use of Physical Models in Development of the M-X Protective Shelter

摘要

The design candidate M-X protective shelters made extensive use of engineering data developed from tests on physical models. This paper describes the effort associated with structural hardening of the three principal M-X shelter concepts: Horizontal Shelter, Vertical Shelter, and Shallow Buried TRench. Primary emphasis was on the trench concept in which a highly coordinated program of theory and experiment provided the data base for (1) characterization of the airblast loading within the trench structure (i.e., shallow buried tube), (2) feasibility determination of blast plug concepts, and (3) developing a minimum cost design for the hardened shallow buried tube. The experimental activities supporting this effort included laboratory and field shock tube testing, high explosive field testing, and an underground nuclear test. Most innovative, from a structural enginneering perspecitve, was the modeling of (1) coupled airblast and ground shock loading and damage-level response of shallow buried fiber-reinforced concrete tubes, (2) expansion and venting of the tube under internal airblast loading, and (3) coupled flow-structural response of the plug/tube system.