Experimental and Numerical Analysis for Non-Load Bearing Sandwich Wall Panels for Blast Mitigation

The use of insulated precast/pre-stressed (PC/PS) concrete and insulated tilt-up concrete sandwich panels for exterior walls is common practice. The sandwich wall systems provide resistance over a large deformation range, making them useful for blast resistance. To develop blast design guidelines for these systems, it is first necessary to develop static resistance functions which are experimentally verified. In this paper, three sandwich panel systems were experimentally and numerically analyzed, including walls with symmetric concrete layers, un-symmetric concrete layers, and symmetric concrete layers with truss girder and pre-stressed strands. Nonlinear 3D FE models were created to analyze the static response of these wall systems for reliable dynamic response predictions. Material and geometric nonlinearities were modeled in this research for all the wall components. Foam-concrete interface and stud anchor load displacement behavior were in included in the FE models. The numerical models showed good correlation with the experimental results.