Submarine hull integrity under blast loading

The paper deals with numerical methodologies to model and study the structural resistance of submarine hull against explosions, where fluid and solid phenomena interact. Explosion Crack Starter Tests (ECST), which are a standard procedure to study submarine materials and weldments with respect to blast loading, are modelled using an explicit FE code that solves Fluid/Structure (F/S) interactions within the same computation. The proposed numerical methods aim at computing the structural response of a target subjected to sequential explosions. Numerical results are compared to the corresponding explosion tests (ECST) performed by DGA (French Ministry of Defence).