Response Evaluation of Reinforced Concrete Block Structural Walls Subjected to Blast Loading

Abstract

With the introduction of the new American and Canadian standards for blast resistant design, there is a need to evaluate the response of different structural components under such extreme loads. This paper focuses on experimentally evaluating the damage levels and the out-of-plane response of fully grouted reinforced concrete block structural walls under blast loading—a load that they are typically not designed to resist. The scaled walls reported in this paper cover a range of design parameters and charge weights that reflect different vulnerabilities and threat levels. Three different reinforcement ratios and three different charge weights have been used, with scaled distances as low as