Ship structure steel plate failure under near-field air-blast loading: Numerical simulations vs experiment

This paper deals with the numerical simulation of the dynamic failure of a ship structure steel plate under near-field air-blast loading. Various energetic levels of air-blast loading, involving variable explosive mass and charge-plate distance, were tested leading to the bulge of the loaded plate for the lowest energy level and to the failure of the loaded plate for the highest level. A modified version of the Gurson–Tvergaard–Needleman potential was used to reproduce the response of the material along the damage-plasticity process at stake. The 3D constitutive equations were implemented as user material in the engineering finite element computation code ABAQUS®, and numerical simulations were conducted and compared with experiments considering air-blast loaded plates. Several crucial numerical issues are addressed concerning notably the use of ABAQUS® conwep function, the hourglass control and the influence of the model constants. Numerical results clearly show the interest of the adopted modelling for the description of salient stages of dynamic structural failure.