Relationship Between Blast Overpressure and Shell Thickness on the Fluid Pressure on a Cylinder Under Blast Loading

The mechanics of blast wave-head interaction determines the magnitude of mechanical insult to the human head during a field explosion and subsequent brain injury. In this work, blast overpressure and shell thickness are related to fluid pressure based on experimental and computational methods. A fluid-filled cylinder is idealized as a two-dimensional analog of a skull-brain complex and is subjected to a Friedlander blast wave. Strain and pressure on the surface of the cylinder and pressure in the fluid (analogue of Intracranial pressure) are experimentally measured and compared with numerical simulation results. The validated numerical model shows that fluid pressure increases linearly with increase in reflected overpressures (ROP) for a given shell thickness. When the ROP is kept constant, fluid pressure increases linearly with the decrease in shell thickness. An equation is developed for predicting the fluid pressure for a given ROP and shell thickness.