Beirut explosion 2020: A case study for a large-scale urban blast simulation

Abstract In the face of continued global urbanization, cities are challenged to satisfy increasing standards in terms of quality of life, environmental conditions, safety, security, health, economic growth and mobility. The concept of “smart cities” aims at utilising advanced technologies, artificial intelligence and high computational capacity to increase their resilience and improve the services provided to the citizens. Computation-based numerical simulations have been essentially used to estimate the effects of explosion events in urban environments in terms of both structural damage and human casualties. These provide urban planners and decision makers with valuable information for vulnerability assessment and aid developing prevention or mitigation solutions. In this article, we present a framework to generate a 3D large-scale urbanistic finite element model, where the desired geospatial data are extracted from the open-source world map OpenStreetMap. The model is used to simulate blast wave propagation effects in a wide urban area taking into account the reflections at building surfaces via a sophisticated Fluid-Structure interaction technique integrated in the EUROPLEXUS explicit finite element method software. The explosion in the Port of Beirut in Lebanon, which took place on the 4th of August 2020, was remarkable for the large amount of explosive material causing considerable damage to surrounding structures and a high number of deaths and injured. Such characteristics make the event suitable for assessing the performance of the proposed computational approach in a widely exposed (by the blast wave) urban zone.