The equivalent method for arbitrary pulses loaded on the elastic-brittle panel

The risk of urban blasts is rising nowadays. As the most fragile component in modern buildings, glass may cause casualties when it fails in a blast. Thus, being able to accurately predict the average splash speed of fragments is of great significance. In almost all the published studies on glass blast-resistance, the blast pulses are treated as monotonously decaying pulses, which is somewhat oversimplified for the pulses with complex shapes in urban blasts. In this study, for the pulses applied to the elastic panels, the applicability of the Youngdahl Equivalent Method (Y-EM), which is usually adopted in plastic analysis, is checked by employing our previous finite deformation approximate solutions. It is confirmed that Y-EM is applicable for the pulses loaded on an elastic-brittle panel when the finish time in Y-EM is set as the time at which the deflection reaches its maximum, rather than the duration of the external pulse. Furthermore, based on the combination of Y-EM and saturation analysis, an equivalent method for arbitrary pulses loaded on the elastic-brittle panel is proposed. Adopting this method, the average splash speed of glass fragments is predicted, which is proved to be accurate by comparison with the published experimental data. As the theoretical basis of the prediction, the pulse equivalent method proposed here is also proved to be effective.