Development of numerical simulation method for an armored vehicle exposed to landmine blast

In this thesis, it is aimed to develop mine protection level of an armored vehicle using numerical simulation methods. First, it was drawn a guideline for blast phenomenon and was explained hand calculations of shock waves in one and two dimension accordingly. "Scaling method" that expresses obtaining same pressure levels with in variety of explosive amounts at different target distances was also described, which is frequently used for blast studies in academic environment. Shock wave propagations both in solids and at target were investigated and their calculations were presented. In order to determine the methodology of blast simulations, different techniques were investigated. For this purpose, acceleration and displacement values collected from two different blast experiments were compared with those of blast simulations. As a result of this comparison, it was concluded that Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian method provides the best approximation to the experimental measurements. Blast simulation parameters were calibrated through the measured data in the free field blast experiments. Thus, the blast simulation model that possesses calibrated parameters with high accuracy and small deviation with respect to blast experiments was established. Blast simulation of full-scale vehicle was performed with aforementioned parameters. Displacement values gathered from the full-scale blast testing were compared to the simulation results. It was observed that the maximum deviation between numerical calculations and experimental measurements was less than 20%. Therefore, it can be concluded that the numerical simulation model was validated with blast test and it provided the interpretation of the blast phenomenon as well as obtaining the optimum design solution in the development process of mine protected armored vehicle.