Abstract
The dynamic response of structures under extremely short duration dynamic loads is of great concern nowadays. This paper investigates structures' response as well as the associated structural damage to explosive loads considering and ignoring the supporting soil flexibility effect. In the analysis, buildings are modeled by two alternate approaches namely, (1) building with fixed supports, (2) building with supports accounting for soil-flexibility. A lumped parameter model with spring-dashpot elements is incorporated at the base of the building model to simulate the horizontal and rotational movements of supporting soil. The soil flexibility for various shear wave velocities has been considered in the investigation. In addition, the influence of variation of lateral natural periods of building models on the obtained response and peak response time-histories besides damage indices has also been investigated under blast loads with different peak over static pressures. The Dynamic response is obtained by solving the governing equations of motion of the considered building model using a developed Matlab code based on the finite element toolbox CALFEM. The predicted results expressed in time-domain by the building model incorporating SSI effect are compared with the corresponding model results ignoring soil flexibility effect. The results show that the effect of surrounding soil medium leads to significant changes in the obtained dynamic response of the considered systems and hence cannot be simply ignored in damage assessment and response time-histories of structures where it increases response and amplifies damage of structures subjected to blast loads. Moreover, the numerical results provide an understanding of level of damage of structure through the computed damage indices.