Natural-gas pipeline accidents mostly result in major damage even to buildings located far away. Therefore, proper safety distances should be observed in land use planning to ensure target safety levels for both existing and new buildings. In this paper, a quantitative risk assessment procedure is presented for the estimation of the annual probability of direct structural damage to reinforced c...

Abstract Blast loading is a critical extreme condition for most engineering structures. Modeling such scenarios challenging due to the intrinsic non-linearities. Recent numerical methods can capture physics governing blast waves and their interaction with structures in more accurate way than established empirical methods. This article intended as proof of concept that state-of-the-art CFD FE so...

The loading conditions used in some current in vivo and in vitro blast-induced neurotrauma models may not be representative of real-world blast conditions. To address these limitations, we developed a compressed-gas driven shock tube with different driven lengths that can generate Friedlander-type blasts. The shock tube can generate overpressures up to 650 kPa with durations between 0.3 and 1.1...

being seen in soldiers who survive such catastrophic injuries[6]. The destructive extent of an explosion is dependent on the nature of the device and the proximity of the soldier when it detonates[7]. In contrast to other forms of weapon (ie firearms), explosive devices have the capacity to injure multiple victims simultaneously by a variety of different mechanisms. Detonation of an explosive d...

Bomb blast injuries are no longer confined to battlefields. With the ever present threat of terrorism, we should always be prepared for bomb blasts. Bomb blast injuries tend to affect air-containing organs more, as the blast wave tends to exert a shearing force on air-tissue interfaces. Commonly-injured organs include the tympanic membranes, the sinuses, the lungs and the bowel. Of these, blast...

Blast waves generated by improvised explosive devices can cause mild, moderate to severe traumatic brain injury in soldiers and civilians. To understand the interactions of blast waves on the head and brain and to identify the mechanisms of injury, compression-driven air shock tubes are extensively used in laboratory settings to simulate the field conditions. The overall goal of this effort is ...

Traumatic brain injury caused by explosive or blast events is traditionally divided into four phases: primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary blast injury. These phases of blast-induced traumatic brain injury (bTBI) are biomechanically distinct and can be modeled in both in vivo and in vitro systems. The primary bTBI injury phase represents the response of brain tissue to the initial blast...

A blast injury is a complex type of physical trauma resulting from the detonation of explosive compounds and has become an important issue due to the use of improvised explosive devices (IED) in current military conflicts. Blast-induced neurotrauma (BINT) is a major concern in contemporary military medicine and includes a variety of injuries that range from mild to lethal. Extreme forces and th...

We evaluated the acute (up to 24 h) pathophysiological response to primary blast using a rat model and helium driven shock tube. The shock tube generates animal loadings with controlled pure primary blast parameters over a wide range and field-relevant conditions. We studied the biomechanical loading with a set of pressure gauges mounted on the surface of the nose, in the cranial space, and in ...

The high incidence of blast exposure on today’s battlefield has been strongly associated with traumatic brain injuries. Anecdotal evidence of prolonged apnea following blast exposure has been observed in military personnel and is commonly reproduced in animal neurotrauma models. Animal models have shown that apnea tolerance is both dose and species-dependent; important factors include primary b...