Blast performance of water tank with energy absorbing support

•Water tank with energy absorbing support was proposed.•LS-DYNA was used to simulate its blast response.•Effect of aluminum foam density on the water tank response was studied.•Effect of response regime on the water tank response was studied.

The blast performance of water tank with an innovative energy absorbing support was studied to reduce the support reaction force and mitigate the damage on the water tank. The aluminum foam was adopted as the energy absorbing material, since it has high energy absorbing potential during crush plateau and safety backup zone after the compaction strain. Finite element model considering fluid and structural interaction in which the water is modeled using the Eulerian formulation and the steel tank by Lagrangian formulation is proposed. The proposed numerical model of water tank was verified by comparing the predicted results with the test results obtained from dynamic pressure tests on steel tanks filled with water. The numerical results showed that the support reaction force depends on the density and yield strength of the aluminum foams and the reaction force could be reduced significantly if softer aluminum foam was chosen. The total displacement of the water tank was increased by up to 38% due to the increase in deformation of the energy absorbing foam. The aluminum foam was proposed to absorb the blast energy and reduce the damage on the water tank. However, more damage on the water tank was observed when a very low density aluminum foam support was used. This was attributed to the increased external work done by blast loading which was higher than the energy absorbed by the aluminum foam support.