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Description:
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The storm shelter designs presented by FEMA 320 , Taking Shelter from the Storm : Building a Safe Room Inside Your House , and FEMA 361 , Design and Construction Guidance for Community Shelters , were developed to protect people from the potentially disastrous effect of extreme winds . In these publications , a number of prescriptive designs are presented for small residential and community storm shelters . These shelters are designed to withstand wind -induced pressures associated with 250 mph ground level wind speeds generated by worst -case tornadoes . Designs were developed and tested on the basis of debris impact resistance . Experimental studies conducted on a full scale storm shelter revealed that storm shelters built according to FEMA 320 prescriptive designs can withstand wind -induced overpressures much higher than the design values assumed for worst -case tornadoes . This finding suggests that these shelters might withstand loads associated with low -level explosion pressures .
The storm shelters were analyzed using the finite element method ; the same analytical tools were used to analyze the shelters against blast loads . 3D dynamic and static analyses using the ALGOR finite element software package were used to perform this study .
The goals of this research were : studying and applying blast loads on civilian structures ; studying the behavior and response of different storm shelters under the effects of blast loads ; and studying the differences between the analytical results of the static and dynamic analyses of structures subjected to blast loads . An important objective was to determine the ability of storm shelters to withstand the effects of explosions of various magnitudes at specified distances from the shelters . |