Since the early 20th century, to protect underground personnel, ventilation seal designs have been required to be tested at an internationally recognised explosion test gallery to achieve pressure ratings required by legislation. The last two decades has seen advances in materials technology and engineering of structures. It has become accepted practice to use numerical methods to provide engineering ratings for mine seals in line with other industries where the elimination of prototype testing provides more rapid product introduction to the market.

In this paper, a high-fidelity physics based (HFPB) finite element model for the explosion rated shotcrete seals is developed using computer code LS-DYNA. The model is suitable for computing dynamic responses of ventilation seals in coal mines subject to explosion loading. The seal model includes the concrete material model that incorporates many important features of concrete behaviour, such as tensile fracture energy, shear dilation, effects of confinement, and invariant failure surfaces. Damage metric is used to gauge the evolution of the concrete’s behaviour from elastic to elasto-plastic, and to softening or fracture.

Simulations of the explosion rated ventilation seals have been undertaken to investigate their resistance to 20-psi (140 kPa) and 50-psi (345-kPa) gas/coal dust deflagration explosions. Computational results from HFPB FE simulations have been shown to compare favourably against available experimental data. The developed HFPB modelling methodology can be used as an alternative to executing explosion tests in explosion test galleries.