John E. Crawford, P.E.
Mr. Craford has accumulated over 40 years experience in the design, analysis, and testing of components and systems to seismic, blast, and impact loads. He has visited numerous embassies and other Government and commercial buildings where consideration of blast and impact loads are important, providing vulnerability assessments and designs for reducing their risks to terrorist bombs. He performs peer reviews of other A&E's blast effects related designs, provides support to the government in legal matters related to blast and shock effects, and has generated a variety of software tools for design and analysis related to blast and shock. He has performed assessments for a broad range of military structures subjected to both conventional and nuclear weapons; has extensive experience with the behavior and response of structural materials (e.g., reinforced concrete and steel that are subjected to blast and impact loads); and is experienced with the response of conventional buildings and building components subjected to blast loads, and personnel hazards. He has extensive experience with predicting the response of mechanical systems to blast and impact, including equipment, piping, and vehicles and their contents. He has developed shock isolation systems and other devices to protect these systems from the effects of shock and impact. He has presented his work at numerous conferences and published more than 500 reports and papers on the subject of blast effects mitigation.
Mr. Crawford has developed a number of unique design concepts to protect buildings, windows, and occupants from the effects of blasts and fragments. He has spearheaded the use of composites and other new materials (e.g., polymers) as essential elements in developing effective and aesthetic blast-resistant designs. He originated the use of analytic human injury modeling to evaluate the effectiveness of blast resistant designs in terms of their impact on lethality and casualty estimates. He has developed and evaluated a variety of airblast barriers including the use of water walls to reduce the effects of airblast. He holds eight patents for various types of protective devices.
Mr. Crawford is one of the pioneers in developing nonlinear 3-D finite element analysis techniques for predicting the actual behaviors of a broad range of structures, especially blast and impact effects on structures and predicting structure failure. He has developed several material models, particularly for simulating behaviors under blast loads. He also has extensive experience with a number of simplified engineering tools, particularly multi and single degree-of-freedom models, and the use of response surfaces and P-I iso-damage curves for determining the response of structural components to blast. He has performed numerous studies to both evaluate and improve the effectiveness of these types of design tools.
At K&C, he is responsible for overseeing the engineering and business operations, research and development of new technologies, contract negotiations, business development, and client relations. Mr. Crawford has worked at four different organizations in his career, and for each, he has primarily provided engineering services related to the behavior of components and systems subjected to blast and impact effects. While employed as a Senior Scientist at TRW's Defense Systems Group (87-92), Mr. Crawford performed studies of missile system vulnerability to blast and launch loads, designed space craft components, and developed software to implement various finite element capabilities needed for space craft analyses. While employed as an Engineering Specialist at Aerospace Corp. (81-87), Mr. Crawford provided intelligence estimates of the vulnerability of various foreign military systems and new designs for super hard US systems. This work involved developing advanced finite element models and codes to simulate response to blast and comparing analytic results with those from companion test programs. While employed with the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (67-81), Mr. Crawford developed a variety of finite element codes for design and study of underwater structures, airfield pavements, hardened structures, ship structures, bridges, large antennae arrays, and containerized facilities (e.g., mobile shelters).