COMPLAS 2023

Numerical Modeling of Blast Loaded Concrete Buildings Using Massively-Parallel Coupled CFD-CSD Techniques

  • Soto, Orlando (Applied Simulations Inc.)
  • Giltrud, Michael (Applied Simulations Inc.)
  • Baum, Joseph (Applied Simulations Inc.)
  • Lohner, Rainald (George Mason University)
  • Togashi, Fumiya (Applied Simulations Inc.)

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This paper describes the application and numerical formulation of a state-of-the-art coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structural dynamics (CSD) methodology to the simulation of explosively loaded reinforced concrete structures. A comparison of experimental and numerical results for a four-story real-life size building are presented to validate the methodology. The objective of the study was to predict the response of the building, the debris generation, and pressure responses within, and external, to it. A bare plastic explosives reference test was selected to assess the effectiveness of a coupled CFD-CSD simulation. The simulation addresses HE initiation, detonation, wave propagation through the HE, air blast and debris impact on the concrete structure. The structural response, structural failure, and progress collapsing are predicted too. Over the last several years we have developed a numerical methodology that couples state-of-the-art CFD and CSD methodologies. The flow code solves the time-dependent, compressible Euler and Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations on an unstructured mesh of tetrahedral elements. The CSD code solves the large deformation, large strain formulation dynamic equations on an unstructured grid composed of bricks and tetrahedral elements, and uses VMS (variational multi-scale) stabilization to improve the robustness and stability of the numerical solution. The codes are coupled via a ‘loose coupling’ approach which decouples the CFD and CSD sets of equations, and uses projection methods to transfer interface information between the CFD and CSD domains. Both codes are parallelized using a distributed memory technique (MPI): The flow and solid domains are divided in several sub-domains which communicates through their respective inter-domain points. Also, the solution on each sub-domain uses share-memory parallelization (OpenMP "loop" parallelization). The final presentation will describe in detail the implementation of the concrete fracture and contact algorithm for the mentioned MPI/OpenMP parallelization scheme, which allows spectacular simulation speed-up for real life applications. Good comparison with the experimental data were found: The predicted structural disassembly agrees well with the high speed photography. The predictions exhibit similar failure mechanisms, failure locations and times of failure. Also, the far field pressures exhibit similar decay with range as the experimental ones.