CIES Receives Funding to Develop Blast Mitigation Technologies

The Centre for Infrastructure Engineering and Safety has received funding from the Australian Research Council and the Shandong Zhihua Construction Group in China to develop innovative Blast Mitigation Technologies. The Minister for Education, the Hon. Christopher Pyne MP, announced the funding outcomes for Linkage Projects commencing in 2014 on 27th June 2014.

CIES Director Professor Brian Uy together with Drs Chunwei Zhang and Won-Hee Kang from the Institute for Infrastructure Engineering at the University of Western Sydney and Professors Lv and Huang from Qingdao Technological University in China were successful with the Shandong Zhihua Construction Group Company in receiving close to $270,000 to carry out research on a topic titled “Development of novel viscoelastic sprayed material for the effective blast resistance of critical and resource infrastructure” .

This project aims to conduct theoretical, numerical and experimental investigations on the mechanism of surface sprayed viscoelastic materials (see Figure 1) for blast mitigation of structural members in critical and resource infrastructure. The project design is different from traditional designs and aims to achieve protection with a higher efficiency, in a flexible manner and at a lower cost. Therefore, it is worth exploring systemically the development of design methods which are not yet available. The project outcomes intend to be incorporated into design codes for the purposes of improving the civil infrastructure environment subjected to extreme events.

The project will also utilise the National Facility for Physical Blast Simulation which is currently being procured at UNSW and hoped to be operational in 2015.