The dynamic performance of simply-supported rigid-plastic circular steel plates subjected to localised blast loading

Near-field explosive charges, such as buried land mines, produce localised blast loadings which can potentially cause damage to property and/or loss of life in both military and civil structures. As the localised short duration blast pulse affects most severely a small area of a plated structure, boundary effects are not as significant as they are when a quasi-static or global blast loading is applied and full plate action may not be utilised.Many common structural forms are composed of individual plated elements and thus the investigation of localised blast loading effects on plates is a prerequisite to understanding the integral behaviour. Typically, plates are made of ductile materials such as steel, which exhibit considerable post-yield deformation capacity when subjected to such extreme dynamic loads. Analytical study of the dynamic plastic response of rigid-plastic plated structures is the aim of the present study.A circular plate is studied in the present work and a general form of a localised blast loading function with a spatial variation having a central radial zone with constant pressure and exponentially decaying profile outside the zone is assumed. Assuming that steel exhibits perfectly plastic behaviour and ignoring membrane action, transverse shear and rotatory inertia effects, the static plastic collapse pressure is initially found and the analysis is extended to take into account the inertial effects arising from dynamic loading. Results for the permanent transverse displacements are found for rectangular and linearly and exponentially decaying pulse loads.For high loads and/or loads of short duration, it was found that the permanent transverse displacement can be found by replacing the applied pulse load by means of an impulsive velocity without great loss of accuracy. Good correlation with numerical simulations obtained from ABAQUS/Explicit is achieved (within 15% accuracy) for plate geometries falling within the identified limits where membrane and shear effects are negligible.The predicted final transverse displacements are found to be dependent on the loading pulse shape, but the pulse-shape effects are eliminated by using the correlation parameters (effective impulse and pressure) advocated by Youngdahl (1971) [52] to give a single pulse shape-independent curve for the final plate deflection as a function of the effective pressure and effective impulse.

► A simply-supported circular steel plate subjected to localised blast is studied.
► Assuming rigid-plastic behaviour, analytical expressions are derived for this case.
► The displacement profile is correlated with FE and good correlation is achieved.
► Results for permanent displacement are obtained for different pulse shapes.
► Pulse-shape effects are eliminated using Youngdahl's correlation parameters.