Research and application of a novel strut-braced blast-resistant shelter in the retrofit of existing buildings

The blast-resistant shelter, as a highly safe and relatively independent blast-resistant reinforcement measure, has not been widely adopted due to its high cost and significant retrofitting difficulties. Based on the equivalent stress distribution at the steel frame beam-support member joints in the supporting blast-resistant shelter, an optimized design was conducted for the weak areas of the joints. A "rigid support + buffer device" buffered support member is proposed, where a buffer layer is embedded at the steel frame beam-support member interface to establish a buffering mechanism, while stiffener plates are symmetrically arranged in the stress concentration zone of the support beam web to form localized flexural stiffness enhancement zones. Parametric design was performed for different types of buffer materials, and the dynamic responses of both the support joints and the original structure during blast simulation were extracted. The results show that the buffer supporting blast-resistant shelter can better ensure that existing buildings are less affected by explosion loads, reducing the dynamic response amplitude of existing structural frame columns by about 25%. The application of the new type of the supporting blast-resistant shelter in the anti explosion reinforcement and renovation project example summarizes the anti explosion reinforcement process. The application of new supporting components not only ensures the anti explosion effect of the anti explosion shield, but also reduces the reinforcement cost by about 30%. This further verifies the engineering feasibility of the new supporting blast-resistant shelter and confirms that the support members incorporated in the innovative supporting blast-resistant shelter reinforcement system demonstrate substantial practical engineering value, it has high potential application value in military, chemical and other fields.