Explosion containment 1

[DennyO]

I am looking for advice about a situation we face. We have customs inspectors at a site who check boxes and parcels of various sizes from foreign countries. We have encountered explosive objects at times, most of these being collector items such as old army ordinance like hand grenades. However, to the inspectors, these do not appear so innocent, and we have to bring in the police bomb squad and vacate a large area, 80 meter radius, when these are encountered.

One way to reduce the extent of the evacuation is to build a smaller enclosure with cinder block walls, but the operation is on a mezzanine and the floor loading does not permit this. Now, we are pondering relocating the whole operation at a high expense just due to this constraint.

While we could use a roof hatch to "dump" the explosive pressure, another issue is containment of fragments. Are there any advanced containment enclosures, using steel mesh or some honeycomb construction which are lighter? When you think that there are bullet proof vests one can wear, its hard to believe that there is not some lighter way to contain fragments than block walls.

 

[IRstuff]

I think that it's most a trade-off on cost. As you indicate, there are body-armor materials suitable for this type of problem. Likewise, there are ceramic and other materials that are commercially available for ballistic protection.

But, the cost is significantly higher. We're probably talking on the order of $500 per square foot of material. Most of the body armor manufacturers also make ballistic shield materials. Ceradyne and Simula are two of the many suppliers of ceramic and carbide composite armors.

TTFN