Prediction of Spatial Peak Overpressure Profile of Air Blast Shocks Using Multiple Linear Regression and Artificial Neural Network

Abstract The shock peak overpressure yielded by energetic materials in the near-earth explosion causes damage to people and property. In the literature, several works have reported the effectiveness in obtaining the peak overpressure in the near field by numerical simulation, real tests, and empirical calculations. However, several issues are associated with the above methods, such as the time-consuming of a complex simulation, the difficulties in placing sensors in an obstacle block site, and the limited scope of applications for empirical equations. At present, there is no single model that can rapidly predict the spatial distribution of shock peak overpressure with ground reflection. In this regard, this paper aims to solve the problem of shock propagation in a large-scale space and obtain a model that can predict a wide range of spatial distribution of peak overpressure in the near-earth air blast simply and quickly. This work uses AUTODYN-2D to obtain the peak overpressure of the cylindrical charge explosion in the air near earth. The peak overpressure from the numerical models agrees with the empirical equations and the real blast results. On this basis, the multiple linear regression (MLR) and the optimal error back-propagation artificial neural network (ANN) models are tried and constructed with three geometric parameters as the input under a typical environment. The input parameters are the straight line scaled distance (SLSD), the vertical scaled distance (VSD), and the scaled height of burst (SHOB), respectively. The prediction results of the MLR and ANN models are verified and compared on the test set. Results show that the ANN model with the geometric parameters as the input is better than the MLR model in predicting the air blast peak overpressure. The former takes no more than 0.2s to compute 1441 sets of inputs, which provides a quick reference for predicting spatial peak overpressure in a large-scale shock wave of the air blast.