Concurrent Computational and Dimensional Analyses of Design of Vehicle Floor-Plates for Landmine-Blast Survivability

Development of military vehicles capable of surviving landmine blast is seldom done using full-scale prototype testing because of the associated prohibitively-high cost, the destructive nature of testing, and the requirements for major large-scale experimental-test facilities and a large crew of engineers committed to the task. Instead, tests of small-scale models are generally employed and the model-based results are scaled up to the full-size vehicle. In these scale-up efforts, various dimensional analyses are used whose establishment and validation requires major experimental testing efforts and different-scale models. In the present work, an approach is proposed within which concurrent and interactive applications of the computational analyses (of landmine detonation and the interaction of detonation products and soil ejecta with the vehicle hull-floor) and the corresponding dimensional analysis are utilized. It is argued that this approach can guide the design of military-vehicle hull-floors which provide the required level of protection to the vehicle occupants under landmine blast attack without introducing unnecessarily high weight to the vehicle. To validate this approach, a combined Eulerian/Lagrangian formulation for landmine detonation and the interaction of detonation products and soil ejecta with the vehicle hull-floor (developed in our previous work) has been utilized along with the experimental results pertaining to small-scale model and full-scale vehicle testing.