Discussion and re-evaluation of recent research on pressure ingress into a room from an opening

Abstract

We review Codina and Ambrosini’s articles Full-scale testing of leakage of blast waves inside a partially vented room exposed to external air blast loading (2018), and Numerical and analytical study of overpressures and impulses inside a masonry box subjected to external blast loading (2019) concerning shock ingress into a room from a façade opening. The articles report the results of a full-scale experimental series for shock ingress loading of a room’s interior walls and compare them to predictions from CFD simulations and the widely used UFC 3-340-02 method. They conclude that the UFC overpredicts the impulse on the room interior side walls by up to 685%, while underpredicting the impulse on the back wall by up to 60%. Subsequently, they recommend applying modification factors to the UFC peak pressure and positive phase duration results to better match the experimental results. In this paper, we review the scarce published research on this subject to highlight the significance of the data presented within these two papers. We then critically assess the design, execution, and analysis of the reported experiments and simulations. We present an alternative analysis of their published data which accounts for the use of non-blast gauges and compare it with our own CFD simulations. These CFD simulations closely predict the alternative analysis of the experimental results and offer amendments to the original papers’ conclusions.