Fragility analysis for the Performance-Based Design of cladding wall panels subjected to blast load

• The extension of the probabilistic Performance-Based Seismic Design procedures to blast engineering problems is proposed.
• The fragility analysis for concrete cladding wall panels under blast is presented.
• The comparison of the reliability results obtained by the unconditional or conditional approaches is provided.
• A discussion on the choice of an appropriate Intensity Measure for Performance-Based Blast Design is provided.

This paper presents a probabilistic method to support the design of cladding wall systems subjected to blast loads. The proposed method is based on the broadly adopted fragility analysis method (conditional approach), widely used in Performance-Based Design procedures for structures subjected to natural hazards like earthquake and wind. The cladding wall system under investigation is composed by non-load bearing precast concrete wall panels. From the blast design point of view, these wall panels must protect people and equipment from external detonations. The aim of this research is to compute both the fragility curves and the limit states exceedance probability of a typical precast concrete cladding wall panel considering the detonations of vehicle borne improvised explosive devices. Moreover, the limit states exceedance probability of the cladding wall panel is estimated by Monte Carlo simulation (unconditional approach) in order to validate the proposed fragility curves.