Scientific methods to support the design of protecting of mobile platforms against IEDs

The detonation of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) can cause high impulse transfer into vehicles in operation and thus endanger the occupants. In the department Experimental Ballistics, scientific methods are being developed to better protect land vehicles against IEDs. A scaled experimental technology was set up to analyze the effect parameters of buried charges. This results in the possibility of an efficient evaluation of improvement measures directly on the vehicle, e.g., vehicle floors with different shapes.

In addition, an arrangement was developed that allows the specific impulse to measure when a buried charge is detonated as a function of the distance in the horizontal plane. After the reaction of the load, several concentric rings are accelerated. The local specific impulse can be determined from the respective velocities. By investigating different embedding materials, important influencing factors for the impulse transfer were worked out, which are used as the basis for the validation of simulation models.