Air blast-induced vibration of a laminated spherical shell

Abstract

The scope of this study is to investigate the dynamic behavior of a laminated spherical shell subjected to air blast load. The shell structure considered here is a hemisphere in shape and made of a glass/epoxy laminated composite material. The blast experiments are performed on the spherical shell. The strain-time history of the center of the spherical shell panel is obtained experimentally. The blast loaded spherical shell is also modeled and analyzed using ANSYS finite element software. The static analysis is performed to characterize the material. The dynamic response of the spherical shell panel obtained numerically is compared to the experimental results. It is observed that the response frequency corresponds to the higher vibration modes of the panel. The qualitative agreement is found between the numerical and experimental results.