Modeling and simulating blast effects on electric substations

A software simulation tool was developed at Idaho National Laboratory to estimate the fragility of electric substation components subject to an explosive blast. Damage caused by explosively driven fragments on a generic electric substation was estimated by using a ray-tracing technique to track and tabulate fragment impacts and penetrations of substation components. This technique is based on methods used for assessing vulnerability of military aircraft and ground vehicles to explosive blasts. An open-source rendering and ray-trace engine was used for geometric modeling and interactions between fragments and substation components. Semi-empirical material interactions models were used to calculate blast parameters and simulate high-velocity material interactions between explosively driven fragments and substation components. Finally, a Monte Carlo simulation was added to model the random nature of fragment generation allowing a skilled analyst to predict failure probabilities of substation components.