Effectiveness of Polyurea Coated Steel Plates in Blast Mitigation in Vehicles

Abstract

Increasing terror attacks and development of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has resulted in the development of protective structures for armoured personnel vehicles (APV). Protective members like flat steel plates are susceptible to damage due to blast load and have been already explored. As an improvement, composite plate having steel with coatings of hyperplastic materials like polyurea, for enhancing the blast mitigation, is being explored. These coated metallic plates can deflect away and absorb a major part of the blast load. One of the objectives of this work is to develop numerical methods for blast loading of structures using Abaqus explicit and validate the results against published results. These validated methods can be used for assessing the effectiveness of protective structures like V-plate with polyurea coating under blast loading. In this work, the main focus is on numerical simulation of the mechanical response of the V-shaped plate. The validation studies cover blast load generation and its interaction with V-shaped plates with and without polyurea coatings and its comparison with results reported in the literature. It is observed that blast functions can adequately model the shock waves generated in the blast loading. The latter part studies the impulse transmitted and deformations. The numerical work was carried out with a full-scale V-shaped plate made of mild steel (and having a projected dimension of about 2500 × 2500 mm), having polyurea coatings of 16 mm, 16 × 2 mm and 16 × 4 mm thickness. The impulse transmitted to the base structure was compared with a V-plate without coating and reduction in the transmitted impulse was observed. It is assumed that the above results may be helpful in obtaining optimized plate designs.