Nowadays, design innovation for safety is a priority in defining the urban planning of a city, making risk detection methods and reliability diagnosis essential. Unfortunately, in the last 15 years some of the most important urban areas in the world have been threatened by terrorist attacks, gas explosions or industrial accidents as well as natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires, tornados and hurricanes.For such reasons, we propose a method to analyze the damage of buildings caused by detonations, either man-made or accidental. This can be exported to other kind of risks.

 

Due to the vulnerability of the cities, governmental agencies are looking for strategies to keep acceptable safety levels, developing resilient plans and tools to manage risks in order to stay always ahead the threats. These actions aim at reducing human loss due to urban incidents and at increasing the confidence of people in the security of the city.We propose a new integrated methodology to assess the damage produced by blast upon buildings. Developed under a theoretical framework and a procedure to analyze the structural blast damage as a function of two initial conditions: the distance between the structure and the detonation (assuming that this occurs at the street level).

 

We use the discrete element method and semi-empirical shock-wave functions to simulate the physics of the problem performing multiple numerical simulations by varying the explosive mass and the structure detonation distance. Then, we analyze the damaged structure under the action of a compression test to calculate its remaining capacity. We also propose an index to evaluate the blast damage which allows to diagnose the state of the structure and to decide the actions to be undertaken after an explosion in a particular case, thus promoting the safety culture. The index is presented in a GIS of the city in order to display the structural damage, so decision makers can create different scenarios.