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SUMMARY

This document gives guidance on the design of stainless steel blast walls made from profiled sheeting, including guidance on material behaviour and selection, response to blast loading, design for longitudinal and transverse bending effects, evaluation of plastic deformation capacity and recommendations on construction details. The document specifically addresses walls constructed of panels with simple trapezoidal corrugations with or without longitudinal flange stiffeners (Figure 1) manufactured from the grades of wrought stainless steel which are widely used in offshore structural applications. Longitudinal web stiffeners are not specifically covered, since they rarely prove economic because local effects tend to govern profile design. The guidance is also generally applicable to the more complex proprietary profile shapes.

The details in this guide refer specifically to vertically spanning walls, however, walls can be installed spanning horizontally between vertical columns. In this case, the attachment details to the columns must be able to accommodate span shortening arising from out of plane deflections in the explosion. Note that the design guidance in this document only applies to cross-sections made up of elements complying with the dimensional limits given in Section 5.2.

Based on the guidance and recommendations in this document, a checklist of information required in enquiry packages for stainless steel blast wall systems has been drawn up and is given in Appendix A.