MEDIUM-WEIGHT COMBAT VEHICLES MINEPROTECTION DEVELOPMENTMETHODOLOGY

摘要

In modern warfare, ballistic armor and especially underbelly protection is one of thecritical considerations in the design of an armored personnel vehicle. The development ofunderbelly protection is complex, expensive, time consuming and therefore needs torely mostly on numerical simulations. This kind of critical and life-saving capabilitymust eventually be validated through blast tests.The practice of developing an underbelly protection is even more challengingwhen developed for a medium-weight vehicle - where the weight of the vehicle islimited. When the development is under strict time and budget constraints, one had tocome up with a unique approach of developing an underbelly protection usingnumerical analysis combined with small-scaled experiments. This approach has alreadybeen used and proven effective during the development of previous heavy platform,and needed even more when the vehicle is limited by its weight.This paper describes the methodology used by the Israeli Ministry Of Defensefor the development of a new medium-weight, wheeled vehicle underbelly protection.This unique approach can be described by the following iterative steps: (1) Initialconcepts Design, (2) Numerical analysis, (3) Small scale tests, (4) Designimprovements, (5) Small scale blast test of vehicle's structure and finally (5) Full scalevehicle mine blast experiment.The first step of initial design includes various geometric solutions, all of the sameweight. Step 2 (Numerical analysis) narrows down the number of concepts to amaximum of three options to be validated in small scale experiments.This paper presents the methodology of the series of simulations performed with LSDYNAas well as the set-up and preparations of the small scaled tests.When keeping the scaling principles, the results of the small scale experiments showedgood structural behavior correlation between the experiments and the numeric analysis.Moreover, it also emphasized the same advantage to the chosen solution.The conclusion from the study so far is that the method of using small scaleexperiments, combined with finite elements numerical analysis, is beneficial. It savestime and costs of the medium-weight vehicles development process – as a step towardsthe final approval of the full scale prototype.