Blast Damage Assessment to a Modern Steel Structures

The terrorist attack of September $11^{th}$ 2001 has enforced a new examination of the response of modern steel structures, such as those found in large warehouses, auditoriums and airport terminals, to terrorist bomb attack. The effort described in this paper assesses the potential damage to such a newly designed structure form a medium-size car bomb. The structure is mostly composed of a lightweight complex beam structure with large windows and skylights piercing through a corrugated roof. The structural response to the terrorist attack requires the modelling of various physics phenomena including bomb detonation, blast wave propagation, reflections, and refractions and resulting blast impact on the structure. Hence, a fluid/structure coupled methodology is used to perform the assessment.