Simulating blast effects on steel beam-column members: Methods

A beam-column element is formulated and implemented within a nonlinear explicit dynamic finite element code for simulating explosive effects in steel skeletal structures composed of wide-flange members. Blast damage is encapsulated by a bounding surface plasticity model in stress-resultant space. Bounding surfaces are formed by fitting numerical failure data to a basis of real-valued spherical harmonics: the data are obtained through numerical experiments in which a shell element-based model of a member is exposed to a blast and then statically loaded to failure for various combinations of proportional moment-thrust loading. Code validation and examples are presented in a companion paper .