Blast Vulnerability Assessment of Road Tunnels with Reinforced Concrete Liners

• Published in: Transportation research record 2018-12, Vol.2672 (41), p.156-164
• Main Authors: Bai, Fengtao, Guo, Qi, Root, Kyle, Naito, Clay, Quiel, Spencer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0361-1981; 2169-4052
• DOI: 10.1177/0361198118798458

Tunnels are a critical component of our transportation infrastructure, and unexpected damage to a tunnel can significantly and adversely impact the functionality of a transportation network. Tunnel systems are vulnerable to potential threats of intentional and accidental blast events because of their relatively unrestricted public access. These events can lead to spalling and breach of the tunnel liner which, depending on the surrounding media, can result in local damage and progressive collapse of the tunnel. Current approaches for evaluating blast-induced damage to a tunnel liner either require significant computational effort or oversimplification such that accurate spatial distributions of damage cannot be obtained. This study presents an effective approach to predict and map the damage to a reinforced concrete liner of a roadway tunnel from various explosive threat sizes and tunnel geometries. A literature review of existing studies is conducted, and potential scenarios of blast events are examined with varying charge position and size. Rectangular, horseshoe, and circular tunnel geometries, each with the same traffic throughput, are evaluated. An efficient analytical approach to determine the spatial distribution of blast-induced spall and breach damage is presented and shows good agreement with numerical models analyzed in LS-DYNA. The proposed approach is then used to examine the relationship between increasing blast hazard intensity and the extent of spall and breach damage. Inflection points in this relationship can be used to identify hazard levels at which a progressive collapse evaluation would be warranted.