Numerical Study on Impulse Reduction Performance of Protective Barriers Made of Steel Posts

Protective barriers are frequently used to protect buildings and their inhabitants from blast and vehicle impact. This paper presents numerical investigations of the impulse reduction performance of protective barriers made of steel posts. To explore the overpressure reduction behind the barriers, the authors presented numerical *LOAD_BLAST_ENHANCED–Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (LBE-ALE) models in a previous study, which combine the advantages of both the empirical method (via the keyword LBE) and the ALE method. These models were modified in this study to provide an accurate prediction of the maximum impulses, which were further used to evaluate the impulse reduction performance of the barriers. They were validated against the impulse data measured in the experiments. It is demonstrated that Barrier Configuration M1 containing eight posts achieves the best performance in reducing the maximum impulse among all the tested barrier configurations. The net impulse reduction is as high as 22.9%, compared to the reference configuration Mref without posts. Additionally, some important observations were made from parametric studies, in which the validated numerical LBE-ALE models were utilized to analyze the influence of diverse parameters on the impulse reduction performance of the barriers, i.e., the number and cross section of posts in the single-layer arrangements as well as the number of layers in the multilayer arrangements.