Synthetik Presenting at the Blast Injury Conference 2021
Our COO, Tim Brewer, is presenting this week at the Blast Injury Conference 2021. His briefing will describe recent work with the UK Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) to interface our free and open-source blastFoam solver with the Human Injury Predictor (HIP) code.
This work provides a higher-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) blast modeling capability within the HIP - a quick-running tool to predict the weapon and injury effects caused by the initiation of a person borne improvised explosive device (PBIED) within crowded metropolitan environments.
Briefing Abstract:
In the aftermath of the London ‘7/7’ attacks in 2005, UK government agencies required the development of a quick-running tool to predict the weapon and injury effects caused by the initiation of a person borne improvised explosive device (PBIED) within crowded metropolitan environments. This prediction tool, termed the HIP (human injury predictor) code, previously employed 1) a simple scaled distance approach and 2) a superposition method to assign the blast-loading parameters that affect each of the crowd members.
To generate more accurate and representative simulations of the underpinning mechanisms of response within the scenario, higher-fidelity physics-based methods are required and this motivated an effort to integrate the free and open source blastFoam solver with the HIP code. This work includes the development, testing, and validation of an SDK (Software Development Kit) using a DLL and Application Program Interface (API) that allows the HIP to call blastFoam at runtime.
blastFoam is a free and opensource computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver developed by Synthetik Applied Technologies and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. The code is intended to specifically solve classes of problem relevant to the HIP code, namely highly compressible multiphase flow problems in 3-dimensional space (i.e., detonation and airblast). The integration of a higher-fidelity physics-based solver now provides HIP users with an ability to rapidly build HIP-compatible 3D urban environments and leverage the relevant equations of state and activation/initialization models (e.g., JWL) required to simulate different explosive types. Computational efficiency and simulation run-times are optimized with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and dynamic load balancing to evenly distribute cell count across computational resources during simulations to mitigate slowdowns and potential crashing from overloaded cores. Furthermore, a GPU version of blastFoam is currently under development and this will be fully compatible with current input files to allow the CPU and GPU to be interchangeable depending on the desired computational hardware to run a specific case.
About DSTL:
The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) is the science inside UK defence and security.
A proven national asset, Dstl is an executive agency of the Ministry of Defence (MOD) providing world class expertise and delivering cutting-edge science and technology for the benefit of the nation and allies.
DSTL: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/defence-science-and-technology-laboratory
The Human Injury Predictor (HIP) Code:
Pope, D.J., 2011. The development of a quick-running prediction tool for the assessment of human injury owing to terrorist attack within crowded metropolitan environments. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 366, 127–143. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0261
blastFoam:
blastFoam is a solver for multi-component compressible flow with application to high-explosive detonation, explosive safety and airblast.
Synthetik's free and opensource CFD airblast code based is available on GitHub: https://github.com/synthetik-technologies/blastfoam
Disclaimer: blastFoam is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, producer and distributor of the OpenFOAM software via www.openfoam.com, and owner of the OPENFOAM® and OpenCFD® trade marks.