Numerical simulation of water-pressure blasting mechanism in breaking viaduct box girder

As a thin-walled structure with a very high content of reinforcement, a viaduct box girder is hard to break using the drilling-style blasting. In this paper, based on the demolition project of Zhuan Yang Viaduct in Wuhan, a blasting plan using the water-pressure blasting technique was proposed to demolish multi-chamber reinforced concrete box girders. The breaking process of the multi-chamber box girder was simulated using the dynamic finite element method, the role played by the shockwave and the explosive gas in the breaking process were analyzed and, on the basis of the analysis and the actual blasting results, the charge arrangement, the blasting parameters and the blasting sequence of the water pressure blasting plan were discussed.