Simulation of a Mine Blast Effect on the Occupants of an APC

In this paper the use of LS-DYNA for the simulation of a mine blast load on an armoured personnel vehicle is presented with comparison to a full test. The investigated vehicle is an M113 APC with occupants seated in commercial seats. Different approaches to the numerical analysis of this complicated event are presented and results are compared. In particular the blast load is applied using the standard engineering model (CONWEP) because of the obvious computational advantages of this approach. However, a fully coupled finite element analysis simulating the interaction between the blast wave, the detonation gases and the vehicle was also performed. It is shown that the classical engineering model can severely underestimate the load on the APC. The use of the LS-DYNA component dummy models for the simulation of the occupants is also illustrated. The numerical simulations using LS-DYNA hydrocode were in good agreement with the experimental results. Those results show that the normal accelerations measured in the dummies pelvis are lower than the critical acceleration.