DASL: Sheltering personnel and aircraft from blast waves.

Our client provides portable, temporary shelters globally. The company’s latest innovation was an airbeam design concept, enclosing a larger work space than previous products. The manufacturer needed a way to validate and verify that the new product would provide effective blast wave protection for personnel and high-value assets, such as aircraft and helicopters. 

We worked alongside DASL to develop numerical models of airbeam components for testing. These models were used to assess how well a bundled beam configuration reduced the impact of blast energy, compared to a single beam. 

To test full-size, shortened airbeam bundles, a laboratory blast test facility (blast tube) was used. The airbeams were placed in the target section of the facility and subjected to different blast waveforms. (Unlike previous full-scale field trials where we have supported our client, the test articles were not at risk to damage from high temperatures or high velocity debris fragments.) 

To predict the airbeam response, we used a fluid-structure interaction model. This approach fully captured the airbeam deformation under the blast pressure loads and, in turn, the effect on the blast wave as it is transmitted through the bundled tubes. Model results and trends compared favourably with the experiment data and showed significant differences in how the airbeam arrangements affected the transmitted pressure. 

Our Chinook computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software modelled the blast source. LS-Dyna's finite element analysis (FEA) software modelled the airbeam structure.

Our client was able advance the design of its new airbeam shelter with confidence.