A study on nuclear blast overpressure on buildings and other infrastructures using geospatial technology

Abstract

An Improvised Nuclear Device or nuclear bomb of yield 10 kiloton to 20 kiloton explodes in any major city due to terrorism or any other reason can cause catastrophic damages on the building's and other infrastructures and also shutting down of critical life-safety systems. The explosion may produce blast overpressure, thermal radiation and harmful instant and delayed nuclear radiations. The buildings and other Civil Engineering structures may be highly vulnerabke due to the blast overpressure from the explosion and thermal radiation. In this present study Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System is effectively utilized to model the blast affected zone from the ground Zero of the study area. This study also introduces different emperical methods to estimate blast loads and structural response. The purpose is to describe the blast effects of a nuclear explosion, thereby informing people of the real dangers posed by nuclear weapons. Therefore, as a case study, we consider a hypothetical City as a target for detonation. Due to security reasons the data for existing City is not used for this study purpose. The study area is hypothetically detonated with a 15 kiloton yield nuclear explosion as surface blast and wind spped is assumed as 5 meters per second. © 2012 Science Publications.