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A Study to Assess the Use of Cylindrical Bars as Blast Barriers

This paper presents the results of an experimental study to assess how cylindrical bars placed between an explosive source and a target plate disrupt the blast wave impinging on the target plate and its blast mitigation capabilities by means of the deflection of the structure. The blast barriers disrupting the blast wave were made from 25mm diameter mild steel solid bars and laid out in six different arrangements to provide different levels of disturbance. In the planning phase, a numerical investigation using LS-Dyna was carried out to provide insights of how the pressure waves interact with the barriers and to investigate the effect of other arrangement of the bars. The blast tests were carried out using a blast tube on a ballistic pendulum with six different charges ranging from 20g to 70 g used for each barrier configuration. The target plates were square Domex 550 steel with a 2 mm thickness and an exposed area of 200 mm × 200 mm. The results showed that placing a barrier between a charge and a target structure may have attenuating effects or more damaging effects depending on the location and number of barriers. For the set of experiments carried out, the placement of the bars with respect to the explosive charge appeared to have a greater influence on the response of the target plate compared to the number of bars used.