Improvised explosive devices have complex, intense, and injurious effects on seated occupants of ground vehicles. Testing these effects is important for the development and assessment of innovative safety designs that will improve survivability. However, generating laboratory tests that adequately simulate realistic blast/shock responses is a difficult task.
Together, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Office of Naval Research developed a novel blast effects simulator installed at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD. The simulator simultaneously produces both the dominant elastic mode and the gross motion of a vehicle subjected to underbody blasts. This bimodal pulse is produced using the momentum exchange principle in which the test platform is an intermediate body in a train of collisions.
This webinar presentation will provide an overview of:
- The technical problem – simulating the underbody blast response of a ground vehicle
- The improved first-generation simulator
- Dynamics and injurious moments of an underbody blast event
- Function, design, and capabilities of the new blast effects simulator
- Model-based simulations used to verify the test apparatus