Abstract:In recent years, the risk of underwater public facilities being impacted by sudden explosive shocks has been increasing, with explosions typically occurring at the project entrances. Underwater blast-resistant doors are crucial protective structures at the project entrances, designed to resist explosive shock loads and ensure the safety of underwater projects. This study aims to investigate the dynamic response and failure modes of steel plate blast-resistant door structures under underwater explosive shocks. Using finite element software, a fully coupled numerical model of underwater explosion with a backing plate was developed based on the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) algorithm. The shockwave load obtained was compared with empirical values, validating the accuracy of the numeri-cal calculations. The results of the direct loading method were compared with those of the coupled model to verify the effectiveness of the direct loading method. To further explore the damage characteristics of the steel plate blast-resistant doors under underwater explosive shocks, a three-dimensional numerical model was developed. The study analyzed the effects of factors such as explosive equivalent, detonation distance, hydrostatic pressure, thickness of the explosion-facing and back-facing surfaces, and thickness of the surrounding support panels on the doors' blast resistance performance. The results showed that as the explosive equivalent increased and the detonation distance decreased, the peak displacement of the doors gradually increased. The structure primarily had two failure modes: local buckling deformation of the skeleton beams and overall bending failure accompanied by buckling instability of the skeleton beams. Under identical explosion conditions, increasing the thickness of the explosion-facing surface, back-facing surface, and surrounding support panels enhanced the blast resistance of the doors. In practical engineering design, panel thickness can be increased to improve blast resistant performance.