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A long-standing partnership between the Brazilian Air Force and George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing is supporting a visiting PhD student’s investigation into explosion research, and enabling faculty to gather data that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.
Anselmo da Silva Augusto, a Brazilian Air Force major, is working with Girum Urgessa, an expert in structural engineering and mechanics, in what Urgessa calls a win-win partnership. “We provide the technical advice and mentorship and gather invaluable data from the tests Anselmo has been conducting.” This ongoing collaboration has yielded rapid results, with three peer-reviewed journal papers and five conference papers to be presented in the U.S., Brazil, and Portugal.
Augusto is a trained civil engineer now pursuing his doctorate, who for nearly 20 years has focused on building protection. His military work led him to study explosives—specifically, how to best protect structures against blasts. The Brazilian Air Force sent him abroad, as part of a partnership with universities worldwide, where their service members study for one year. Urgessa, a professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering, was happy to host him, having met Augusto during a previous visit to Brazil, where Urgessa was a keynote speaker at an international defense symposium.
Augusto’s work examines how steel sheets respond to near-field blasts and investigates protective systems such as elastomers, rubber-like polymers that stretch. The technical and safety requirements make these tests impossible to conduct at George Mason.
“You need to be far from urban areas, and you must have appropriate protocol for the safe handling of explosives,” said Augusto, describing the challenges of setting off an explosive roughly the size of an apple. “Also, there are several people involved, including safety experts, engineers, and technicians.” High-speed cameras record the explosions, allowing the researchers to see the detonation in detail. “With the camera, recording at 10,000 frames per second, we are able to see the sheet deforming, which happens in about one millisecond.”
The team working in Brazil scans the damaged sheets and sends the data to Augusto, who 3D prints a replica, a completely accurate, small-scale version of the results that he can hold in his hands.
Augusto and Urgessa are using the findings to inform best practices for retrofitting structures against human-induced or accidental explosions. Augusto said, “If you have an existing historical building, you can apply this protective material to enhance its capacity. Or, in other applications, you may have a tank or a military vehicle that needs to be as light as possible and use different types of polymer composites for better protection.”
Urgessa said, “When we think about new construction, having this information helps to determine safe stand-off distances. It supports site planning decisions. We can't predict the exact magnitude of the next threat, but field-scale tests supplemented by computational models help us design resilient and secure structures.”