Securing Infrastructure from High Explosive Threats

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is working with the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate, the Transportation Security Administration, and several infrastructure partners to characterize and help mitigate principal structural vulnerabilities to explosive threats. Given the importance of infrastructure to the nation's security and economy, there is a clear need for applied research and analyses (1) to improve understanding of the vulnerabilities of these systems to explosive threats and (2) to provide decision makers with time-critical technical assistance concerning countermeasure and mitigation options. Fully-coupled high performance calculations of structural response to ideal and non-ideal explosives help bound and quantify specific critical vulnerabilities, and help identify possible corrective schemes. Experimental validation of modeling approaches and methodologies builds confidence in the prediction, while advanced stochastic techniques allow for optimal use of scarce computational resources to efficiently provide infrastructure owners and decision makers with timely analyses.