Transient Motion of Circular Elastic Plates Subjected to Impulsive and Moving Loads

During the past decade considerable effort has been channeled toward increasing the capability of equipment to sustain severe nuclear weapon environments. These efforts, commmonly called "hardening," employ various combinations of analytical and experimental approaches, each approach having certain difficulties and shortcomings. Problems that are analytically tractable are usually restricted to simple and regular geometries and usually incorporate simplifying approximations as to material properties, weapon phenomenon, and separation of the combined weapon effects into independent and separate effects. One of the areas of hardening which lends itself to both analytical and experimental treatment and for which some full-scale nuclear test data are available is the response of structures to an air-blast wave; the analysis of structures subjected to air-blast pressure waves is the subject of the present article. In particular, the transient displacements of circular clastic plates subjected to impulsive and moving loads will be analyzed according to the classical plate theory. The classical, or small 2409