Response of Offshore Structures to Explosion Loading

This paper describes simplified and advanced methods which can be used in the evaluation of the blast resistance of offshore structures and individual components. For component analysis, improvements to single degree of freedom procedures are suggested, which enable the efficient modelling of the strain-rate effect and the beam-column action. For assemblages, adaptive nonlinear analysis procedures supplement the accuracy of the nonlinear finite element method with considerable computational and modelling savings, rendering its application practicable. Several comparative examples are presented in this paper which illustrate the applicability and relative accuracy of the various methods. Received March 12, 1996: revised manuscript received by the editors December 31, 1996. The original version (prior to the final revised manuscript) was presented at the Sixth International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference (ISOPE-96), Los Angeles, USA, May 26-31, 1996.