Summary of the Behavior of Steel-Plate Composite (SC) Walls Subjected to Implusive Loads

Abstract

Steel-plate composite (SC) walls are a viable alternative to reinforced concrete (RC) for protective structures and offer several advantages over RC. Current blast resistant design standards describe methods to design protective structures using RC, structural steel, or masonry in part because of the available experimental database for these materials to validate design methods. While there are blast test results of steel-concrete composite panels available in the literature, they are few and the majority are of specific configurations making it difficult to extrapolate to general behavior. This paper reports representative experimental results of simply supported one-way steel-plate composite (SC) wall sections, designed in accordance with AISC N690s1 Appendix N9 (AISC, 2014), and loaded with short duration uniform pressure pulses representative of far-field blast effects. Two numerical methods to assess the performance of SC walls subjected to blast loads are discussed and comparisons of experimental to numerical results are provided.