Impact Resistance Design of RC Protection Shelters under Falling Weight Impact Loading

Abstract

In engineering practice, there are many situations in which structures undergoes impact or dynamic loading such as during an explosion, impact of ice load on pile structures, snow avalanches, accidental falling loads, tsunamis and tornadoes generated projectiles etc .The impact phenomenon of structures generally includes; the local response due to the stress wave occurring at the loaded point in a very short period after impact and the other is the overall response or quasi-static response due to the elastic-plastic deformation occurring at the whole structural member in the long period after impact. Protection shelters are constructed to protect human lives and traffic flows from accidental falling rocks over roads constructed in mountainous area or near shorelines. In these areas earth-quakes and land sliding is the major phenomenon for damages to highway structures and human lives. Therefore the Protection shelters are one of the important structures in these areas. In order to establish a rational impact resistance design procedure for RC Protection shelters based on not only allowable stress design but also on ultimate state design and/or performance based design method, impact resistant capacity and/or maximum in put energy for RC Protection shelters must be clearly estimated. However in this research maximum input impact energy for reaching ultimate state will be numerically estimated by means of three dimensional elasto-plastic finite element method (FEM) for RC Protection shelters by proposing three layers of absorbing system including (Sand cushion , RC slab, and Expanded Poly-Sterol i.e. EPS layer) under falling heavy weight by using software LS-DYNA CODE.