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Terrorist events that occurred in the last years changes the global security policy, imposing additional safety measures for building design. Therefore, the protection of access routes should be considered by using protective doors to resist to impact and explosions effects. This paper presents a thorough analysis on establishing a proper configuration to ensure a minimum level of blast protection for metallic doors used for government and military buildings. The analysis includes experimental tests and numerical analysis performed on a 1/3 scale model. Seven different sandwich-type configurations were tested according to specific requirements of actual standards. Each door was successively mounted on a metallic frame, horizontally placed, and a spherical plastic explosive charge, at a standoff distance of 35 cm, was detonated. The deformations were measured on each side of the door, offering the valuable data of their strength capacity and also of the dissipation energy level. The door with a honeycomb interior configuration resulted to be the optimal solution. The numerical results showed a good correlation with numerical ones, permitting the further development of a full-scale model.

The structural engineering community often deals with the issue of inelastic incursions of the structural response. Although buildings situated in seismic regions are usually designed using elastic analysis, most encounter significant inelastic deformations when major events occur. In general, material nonlinearity is the most important source of nonlinearity considered in the dynamic analysis commonly performed in structural design. In this paper, the recent concept of the force analogy method for 3D structures is developed and integrated into an accurate computational efficient algorithmic routine for nonlinear dynamic analysis of reinforced concrete frames. Moreover, a unique straightforward mathematical model for the numerical implementation of degrading cyclic behavior of structural elements is proposed and further used to simulate the response of a 10 story reinforced concrete frame structure. A set of nonlinear dynamic analyses are performed using the proposed algorithm in order to assess the structural damage in case of different peak ground accelerations seismic recordings. The seismic structural damage is evaluated using both structural response parameters expressed in terms of displacement and energy concepts.

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