Assessment of explosion effects in railway stations

ABSTRACT: Numerical simulation tools have been developed suitable for the assessment of the physical vulnerabilities of rail transport infrastructures to explosion loads, mainly due to terrorist bomb attacks. The source term, the air medium and the structure are properly modeled using the computational framework of the explicit finite element code Europlexus. Several new features are added to the code. A case study of a rail station has been conducted, whose geometry has been reconstructed using a laser scanning technique. For several bombing scenarios the structural response is reliably determined, and through appropriate probit functions, the associated risk of human injuries has also been calculated