A Critical Review of Blast Wave Parameters and Approaches for Blast Load Mitigation

Casualty analysis of major terrorist attacks in recent decades shows an enormous increase in fatalities and economic losses. Due to frequent terrorist attacks and failure of engineering structures under blast load, this issue has gained the attention of scientists and structural engineers. Recently, threat due to explosions is considerably raised owing to the availability of small size explosive devices with powerful and high range explosive materials. Thus, there is an immediate need for the structures, vulnerable to such tragic events, to be analysed and designed to resist these extreme loading conditions. To predict the behavior of structure under explosion loads, blast load analysis needs to be done. The effective blast parameters such as standoff distance, angle of incidence, explosive type and charge weight with its damaging effects discussed by various researchers have been overviewed in the present work. Further, it is uneconomical to harden the structure to resist the blast load. Therefore, certain strategies which can be adapted to mitigate the effect of blast pressure have also been analysed, and discussed different analytical models for prediction of blast loads. The paper present basics of blast for beginner researchers and structural engineers to understand such complex loading scenario.