Numerical simulations and experimental analysis of a vehicle cabin and its occupants subjected to a mine blast

Abstract

When military vehicles are subjected to a mine blast, the vehicles will be damaged and the occupants will be injured. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the responses of the floor-plate of the vehicle cabin and of its occupants subjected to the blast using numerical and experimental methods. A numerical analysis of the floor-plate of the vehicle cabin and of its occupants in the event of mine detonation under the vehicle cabin with LS-DYNA software was carried out, the shock wave from the mine was modelled approximately using LS-DYNA and the vehicle driver was represented by using a Hybrid III dummy. The simulations obtained most of the details of the model including the stress, the displacement, the velocity, the variation in the energy of the cabin’s floor-plate, the overpressure and the response of the dummy. Moreover, four tests at full-scale were completed on the specific vehicle subjected to shock waves that originated from the detonation of four different equivalent mine surrogates. Two different kinds of sensor (pressure sensors and dummy sensors) were used to measure the overpressure of vehicle and the response of the dummy. A comparison of the results shows good agreement between the numerical simulations and the experiments. The results show that the combination of these two methods can be used in blast modelling with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Also, the results provide insight into the vulnerability of the vehicle cabin and its occupants to the effects of blast mines and provide a good foundation for a subsequent optimization study of the model.