Numerical Evaluation of an Add-On Vehicle Protection System

Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) has been involved in programs to reduce the vulnerability of vehicles to mines and improvised explosive devices for many years. In this work, DRDC was mandated to design and optimize an add-on vehicle protection system. Testing an entire vehicle against improvised explosive devices or blast landmines is both time-consuming and “expensive; therefore, to reduce costs, numerical simulations using the LS-DYNA hydrocode [1] were performed to support the development phase of the protection system. A finite element model of a simplified full-scale model of the vehicle called a mock-up was developed for this purpose. This model included the critical sections that were likely to be affected by a threat. Finite element studies were then performed to compare the performance of several protection designs and to orient on the choice of the final one. This paper presents the loading model that was used to simulate the effect of a landmine on the structure, the finite element (FE) models of the baseline and of three concepts and finally, a comparison of the relative performance of the different protection system designs.