Numerical simulation of armored vehicles subjected to undercarriage landmine blasts

Abstract

Landmine threats play a crucial role in the design of armored personnel carriers. Therefore, a reliable blast simulation methodology is valuable to the vehicle design development process. The first part of this study presents a parametric approach for the quantification of the important factors such as the incident overpressure, the reflected overpressure, the incident impulse, and the reflected impulse for the blast simulations that employ the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation. The effects of mesh resolution, mesh topology, and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) parameters are discussed. The simulation results are compared with the calculations of the more established CONventional WEaPons (CONWEP) approach based on the available experimental data. The initial findings show that the spherical topology provides advantages over the Cartesian mesh domains. Furthermore, the FSI parameters play an important role when coarse Lagrangian finite elements are coupled with fine Eulerian elements at the interface. The optimum mesh topology and the mesh resolution of the parametric study are then used in the landmine blast simulation. The second part of the study presents the experimental blast response of an armored vehicle subjected to a landmine explosion under the front left wheel in accordance with the NATO AEP-55 Standard. The results of the simulations show good agreement with the experimental measurements.