Foam concrete is a prospective material in defense engineering to protect structures due to its high energy absorption capability resulted from the long plateau stage. However, stress enhancement rather than stress mitigation may happen when foam concrete is used as sacrificial claddings placed in the path of an incoming blast load. To investigate this interesting phenomenon, a one-dimensional difference model for blast wave propagation in foam concrete is firstly proposed and numerically solved by improving the second-order Godunov method. The difference model and numerical algorithm are validated against experimental results including both the stress mitigation and the stress enhancement. The difference model is then used to numerically analyze the blast wave propagation and deformation of material in which the effects of blast loads, stress–strain relation and length of foam concrete are considered. In particular, the concept of minimum thickness of foam concrete to avoid stress enhancement is proposed. Finally, non-dimensional analysis on the minimum thickness is conducted and an empirical formula is proposed by curve-fitting the numerical data, which can provide a reference for the application of foam concrete in defense engineering.
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