Sivakumar Palanivelu

Performance of Sacrificial Cladding Structure Made of Empty Recyclable Metal Beverage Cans under Large-Scale Air Blast Load

This paper demonstrates the use of recyclable waste products such as typical empty metal beverage cans available in the market for the protection of civil engineering structures from an explosive load. The sacrificial cladding structure was made of empty recyclable beverage cans and sandwich composite skin plates. To measure the protection efficiency of these structures large-scale air blast experiments have been conducted. To create a perfect plane shock wave the concept of shock tube was used using concrete sewage pipes. The experimental and numerical crushing performance of the empty beverage cans is studied in detail. Finally, this study concludes that the waste empty metal cans can be considered as a potential member to protect civil engineering structures from the air blast load.

Impact Study of Textile Reinforced Cementitious Materials: Test Method and Preliminary Results

In building engineering, impact loading and other accidental loads are mostly taken into consideration by measures on the structural level rather than on the material level, the latter one is even seldom explored. Textile reinforced Cements (TRCs) is a composite material group which is still in full development. Its potential to dissipate a significant amount of energy under low velocity impact loading was already indicated in a preliminary study. In the present study, the low velocity impact behaviour of TRC laminates is investigated more closely and this by means of an instrumented drop weight test. This study has shown the ability of the used test method to identify damage mechanisms underlying the energy absorption under low velocity impact loading in TRC composite laminates.