Occupant Injury Simulation Using Human Surrogate During Vehicle Underbody Mine Blast Loading

Abstract

Anti-Vehicle mine is designed to damage or destroy vehicles including tanks and armored fighting vehicles and its occupants. Recent advances in materials have enabled designers to develop mine protected vehicles that can withstand and minimize damage during mine blast. However the occupant safety factor due to tertiary blast injuries in design of mine protected vehicles has been a major concern since experiments in underbody mine blast testing using physical instrumented human surrogates is a costly affair. In the present simulation study a Hybrid III 50th percentile finite element dummy placed inside a vehicle hull is subjected to denotation of TNT using Multi Material Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (MMALE) method. Injury criteria are estimated to evaluate occupant safety. It was observed that the Head Injury Criteria (HIC) and resultant acceleration are within the limit since there was no direct impact of the occupants head. However the compressive loading on the tibia which was directly above the detonation was found to be higher than the safe limit indicating serious injuries to lower extremity. The results provide an insight on the vulnerability of crew seated inside during mine blast loading/