Design and analysis of protection system for military vehicles against explosives

Abstract

The blast effect from landmines or IEDs is a severe threat to Light Armour Vehicles used in military operations. Hence High-level protection for military vehicles against explosives is an important and demanding problem faced worldwide in the defence sector. To design high-level protection for military vehicles, numerical simulation study plays an important role. It is also a valuable tool for parametric investigations that would be too expensive to carry out experimentally. Hence numerical codes for simulation of highly non-linear physics involved are effectively used for studying blast effects and designing the protection mechanisms for military vehicles. In this project, we first learn to simulate this highly non-linear physical problem in explicit solvers (Autodyn, Ansys Explicit and Abaqus), and we were able to have good agreement with the experimental results. Then we study the effect of blast explosion on different sandwich structures(With Hexagonal, Square and Sandwich cores). The hexagonal core-based sandwich structure was found to be the best for the protection of ground explosives like landmines. A parametric investigation was done for the hexagonal core-based sandwich structure. We were able to determine the best sandwich structure for the protection of the bed of military vehicles and obtain parametric trend analysis on it. For future work, we can use GPR(Ground-penetrating Radar) data to train ML/AI models for the detection of landmines, which can be fitted in Military vehicles; furthermore, we can study the blast loading by using composite materials, and material models as well as using different design structures. Keywords: Explicit Dynamics, Ansys, Abaqus, blast loading, Lagrangian RF, Eulerian RF