Soil Behavior Under Blast Loading

摘要

Many commercial and military endeavors, such as defense, construction, earthquake prevention, disaster mitigation, and mining, involve soil dynamics. Soil behavior under blast loading have been studied by engineers and researchers (Wang and Lu 2003; Tong and Tuan 2007; Grujicic et al. 2008). Soil is an assemblage of individual particles, rather than a continuum, that soil may have various degrees of water saturation. A rapid release of energy from a buried explosion causes a sudden rise of pressure or a shock front propagating through a soil medium, it is very challenging to accurately predict soil behavior under blast loading. Therefore, to date common practice in modeling soil behavior under blast loading is mainly based on empirical formulae from field tests (Wang et al. 2004). Since conditions varied in those test sites, predictions using those empirical formulae scatter significantly. Discrepancy at the same scaled distance could be more than two orders of magnitude between dry and saturated soils (Drake and Little 1983). Soil is composed of solid particles with different sizes and shapes that form a skeleton and the voids are filled with water and air. The soil is saturated if all the voids are filled with water. Otherwise, the soil is partially saturated. If all the voids are filled with air, the soil is said to be dry. It is a common practice in soil mechanics to assume that the solid particles do not deform and the water phase is incompressible. Hence, external loading is supported by the skeleton and the water.