Road and rail transport account for the largest portion of the movement of dangerous goods (DG) in developed countries. The consequences of recent accidents involving DG associated with such modes of transport have had great impact on people and the environment, and have caused disruption of the transportation services. To minimize the effects of transportation accidents associated with DG, the use of suppressive shield (SS) structures have been recommended by several researchers. This paper presents the performance of four types of suppressive shield panels (SSPs) using a numerical approach to verify an experimental study that was performed to investigate the SSPs potential for mitigating blast pressure to safe limits to aid inprotecting civilians as well as transportation infrastructure. It has been demonstrated with this numerical investigation that the results from thedeveloped numerical approach correlate well with those of the experimental tests where attenuation rates in the range of 50-60% were obtained usingthe SSPs. The accuracy in predicting the pressure attenuation demonstrates the capability of numerical modeling as an efficient tool in the study of SSPs applications in various scenarios with larger explosive charges without the need to carry out expensive and time consuming experimental studies.
Samenvatting