| Mitigation techniques are currently being sought to ensure public safety in the event of intentional or accidental explosions. Building material fragmentation is a major cause of human injury during such events. One of the most common methods of construction in buildings is the use of concrete masonry walls. Concrete masonry provides a fast inexpensive way to construct buildings of various heights; however, these walls are extremely vulnerable to blast pressure resulting in collapse, fragmentation, and severe injury to occupants.;Much research has been conducted using actual blast tests as well as computational methods to study the behavior of masonry walls. Blast tests examined masonry walls of various shapes and make up, as well as the use of retrofit materials to mitigate the blast damage to masonry.;In the computational arena, research made use of Livermore Software - DYNAmics (LS-DYNA) finite element software to simulate full-scale models of concrete masonry walls. The results were compared to the actual blast tests, but the cost of high fidelity computational models made them impractical for day-to-day design. Design tools developed by other investigators in the field have been available for the past few years; however, their accuracy remains questionable when compared to actual blast test data.;The research presented in this dissertation developed resistance functions for three different scenarios of membrane retrofit unreinforced concrete masonry walls to lateral pressure. These functions were further coupled with single degree of freedom systems to predict the wall response to blast loads. The analysis results were compared to field blast tests for verification.;This research gives the structural engineer a practical software tool for the design of membrane retrofit masonry walls to resist lateral pressures such as wind, and various blast charges and distances. |
