We analyze structural response to extreme events to quantify vulnerability, risk and design mitigation methods. This information helps to optimize the design of protective measures and meet government-mandated design criteria for civil infrastructure; hardened military structures; ships; transport vehicles (including hazardous materials transport); and vulnerable building components such as windows, doors and curtain-wall products.
Our expertise includes the ability to analyze a wide variety of extreme events, such as:
• Conventional and nuclear weapons effects, in both air and water
• Cratering and ground shock soil-structure interaction
• Underwater explosion effects, including shock, bubble, whipping, near-field interaction and equipment survivability.
• Improvised explosive device (IED) effects
• Penetration effects
• Impact effects of vehicles, aircraft, ships, trains and ballistic projectiles
• Progressive collapse
• Fire and thermal effects
We develop and maintain computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structural dynamics (CSD) codes that we use to model fluid (air and water) and structural behavior, fluid-structure interaction, equipment response and human injury effects.
The results of our simulations have been extensively validated against field tests conducted by the Department of Defense and commercial clients. Our engineers and analysts also support large-scale experimental field tests.
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