Product Area: Infrastructure Protection

Overview

Large bombs, such as vehicle bombs, present a particular danger to public and private infrastructure. As demonstrated by the first World Trade Center attack, the Oklahoma city federal facility attack, and countless attacks against embassies, buildings and infrastructure in the middle east, large structures are continuously vulnerable to large explosions.

Conventional approaches to protecting critical infrastructure rely on adding layers of hardening or armoring, but for explosives devices placed directly on or in the structure these measures could in some circumstances lead to unexpected and dangerous failure modes, and in some instances, the damage to the structure may actually be increased. The Transportation Security Laboratory's (TSL) Infrastructure Protection team works to address the challenge of large explosions that are near, or even in contact with infrastructure targets. The collective expertise of the staff at the TSL, which spans fundamental materials science to empirical studies of blast effects and blast mitigation methods, is brought to bear on efforts to prevent or mitigate malicious attempts to destroy our national infrastructure. The Infrastructure Protection group includes experts in access control who work with the Transportation Security Administration to optimize security checkpoint layout and signage for maximum throughput, customer communication, and security efficiency.

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Results

“Making Space” to Protect Infrastructure. The Infrastructure Protection group, in partnership with the United States Army, have conducted innovative tests that show that in many cases, “soft armor” is the most effective. The Infrastructure Protection team also explore sacrificial materials that can take the force and structural loading out of explosions by mimicking the effects of distance. For example, a steel bridge tower has a much greater danger from being “pushed” by an explosion as opposed to destroyed by the blast energy. The Infrastructure Protection team conducts pioneering research on use of organic materials such as volcanic rock, water spheres, and oil clays to dramatically reduce the effects of explosions on targets such as bridges, tunnels, buildings, dams, and other infrastructure. This is accomplished by absorbing, diffusing, and diverting the energy from an explosion. Through these efforts the Infrastructure Protection group has shown that explosive forces can be countered by “manufactured space.”

Building it better from the ground up. The Infrastructure Protection team at the TSL has pioneered the thinking in security design of new transportation terminals. In 2005, we sponsored the first international design challenge to undergraduate and graduate architectural students to design a Category One airport from the ground up, with security as the major design criterion, but incorporating best design elements for current airline operational needs, passenger use patterns and expectations, and concession development.

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