PAXCON is a military grade polyurea coating designed to provide protection from the effects of high powered explosions by maintaining structural integrity and reducing the effects of flying debris. Testing was recently performed at the Stone-OBL open arena facility, designed and planned by Stone Security Engineering. The test compared the effects of an open-air high powered blast with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil (ANFO) equivalent to a car bomb explosion on uncoated and PAXCON-coated unreinforced cinderblock walls.
The uncoated wall was completely destroyed and became a flying debris hazard and while the PAXCON-coated wall showed effects of the blast, the interior and exterior coating layers remained structurally intact, contained all masonry debris, and suffered almost no effects of fragmentation.
Uncoated Wall
Source
Perimeter barriers – whether they be crash rated or not – are an important part of many of the projects we all work with on a day-to-day basis.
The following is a quick exercise that you can use to start your mind, and the project team, working in the proper direction.
Imagine that you have not yet put pencil to paper and you are just starting to think about what types of perimeter protection your site might need. Click here for some (but not all) questions you should ask yourselves. Many of the answers to the questions below will be provided by the project brief, but you must still know the answer to start the perimeter design.
There are many things which make blast resistant design different than traditional design, but one that we often take for granted is the fact that we are not preventing damage, we expect damage to occur.
Our goal is to mitigate the hazardous effects of building damage to protect the assets – be they people, equipment, or information – inside the building. So, when someone says “a column (or window, or wall, etc.) ‘failed'”, you still don’t know the whole story. If it is a Blast Consultant saying this – they mean that the building element exceeded the acceptable level of damage. If a non-blast-trained person says this – they may be simply referring to the fact that there was damage.
Take a look at this video and ask yourself “did this window system fail?” My answer is “No”. This is because that while the exterior panes of glass broke, the inner panes did not. They maintained a hard-line, which is what protects the people inside the building.
Please join us at our Protection in High Threat Environments – Demonstration Course where we will discuss blast and other attack phenomena in the morning…and demonstrate it in the afternoon.
The early registration deadline (February 28) is nigh. Sign up soon and reserve your spot! Click here for more information.
