Mitigation of Vehicle Crew Blast Injuries through Modeling and Simulation

Road-side mines and IEDs are the major thread to US military personnel riding in tactical wheeled vehicles. The development of mine protection systems to decrease the vehicle vulnerability and, more importantly, of their crew requires accurate assessment of the effects of blast on the vehicle, armor and on occupants before the vehicle is fabricated and fielded. Unfortunately, there are no computational tools integrating blast dynamics, vehicle structures dynamics and human biomechanics. The goal of this project is to develop a high-fidelity computational framework for automated physics-based simulation of blast damage to armored vehicles and injury potential to vehicle occupants. The proposed framework will integrate models of detonation physics, two-phase (gas, sand/debris) blast wave dynamics, vehicle loading, vehicle dynamics/damage, human body dynamics and injury. It will enable seamless integration of software components from CFDRC, DoD Labs, and commercial tools (FEM, CAD). The modeling tool will be validated against data from field testing and operational accidents. Working with the Navy, Marines the tools will be used to analyze vehicle response to various blast loads, load profiles on crew members, the effectives of the vehicle armor, crew protection and safety designs. The proposed computational framework, CoBi, will provide first ever coupled fluid-structures interaction capability.