ABSTRACT
Recent and continuing terrorist attacks on all of our nations’ building and transportation infrastructure have clearly demonstrated the need to develop and implement blast mitigation and hardening optimization methodologies to protect our built infrastructure, both at home and overseas. In many cases similar structural response for both the seismic and the blast load case can be observed. For example, both can result in progressive structural collapse and mitigation measures, such as design for redundancy and ductility, as well as retrofit measures to increase concrete confinement apply to both seismic and blast conditions. The vulnerability of these structures under a range of potential threat scenarios must be quantified. New and existing retrofit technologies must be verified. Computational seismic and blast physics models must be improved and validated for damage prediction and to determine effective mitigation strategies.
