Experimental Study of Explosion Mitigation by Deployed Metal Combined with Water Curtain

In this paper, protective barriers made of perforated plates with or without a water cover were investigated. In urban areas, such barriers could be envisaged for the protection of facades. An explosive-driven shock tube, combined with a retroreflective shadowgraph technique, was used to visualize the interaction of a blast wave profile with one or two plates made of expanded metal. Free-field air blast experiments were performed in order to evaluate the solution under real conditions. Configurations with either one or two grids were investigated. The transmitted pressure was measured on a wall placed behind the plate(s). It was observed that the overpressure and the impulse downstream of the plate(s) were reduced and that the mitigation performance increased with the number of plates. Adding a water layer on one grid contributed to enhance its mitigation capacity. In the setup with two plates, the addition of a water cover on the first grid induced only a modest improvement. This blast mitigation solution seems interesting for protection purposes.