Armored Protected Vehicles (APV) Design Principles
Anti-tank mines and improvised explosives are designed to damage or destroy vehicles, including tanks and armored vehicles. Several advances have been made in the development of modern anti-tank mines and improvised explosive devices, increasing the threat these weapons pose to land-fighting forces. The explosives can be hidden anywhere: in potholes, in trash piles, underground, inside of humans and animals. In addition to disguisability, the devices have, over time, become more and more sophisticated with designs enabling them to have more effective explosive payloads, anti-detection and anti-handling features, and more sophisticated fuses.
Many explosive devices are detonated directly underneath or in proximity to armored vehicles. Existing vehicles manufactured with a flat or nearly flat under belly suffer severe damage from such blasts. With flat-bottomed vehicles, the blast effect from an explosive device frequently proves fatal to the vehicle's occupants because of the vertical deflection caused by the blasts. Moreover, sharp angles in the structure of flat-bottomed vehicles such as at the edges of plates result in bending about a localized pivot point during an explosion.
Recognizing these and other problems, manufactures have attempted to develop alternative blast-protection schemes. Many of those alternative schemes have, unfortunately, proven inefficient and unworkable. For example, increasing the thickness of the hull or raising the hull height can improve a vehicle's performance when an explosion occurs. However, these design changes--increasing thickness and raising height--create other problems they reduce a vehicle's mobility and payload and reduce the available stroke for mitigating the black shock which affects occupant survivability.
When a blast occurs, an armored vehicle should manage and absorb the energy and impulse generated from a blast and soil ejecta in an effective way. When a blast is managed, a vehicle will adequately mitigate the mine or IED explosion by minimizing excessive damage to the vehicle and substantial injury to the crew. To accomplish this, three primary ways exist to manage the blast energy and impulse that a vehicle experiences during an explosion. First, a vehicle's design should minimize the blast pressure it receives. Second, a vehicle's design should minimize its response to the blast, including minimizing a deflection or rupture response. Third, a vehicle's design should minimize the threat to crew survivability by reducing acceleration and reduce the potential injury of the crew due to the hull's deflection. Vehicles, particularly armored vehicles, are efficient in mitigating mine or IED blasts in that these embodiments may satisfy one or more of three above-mentioned ways to manage the energy and impulse generated from a blast.
The simple and most common Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in 2003 consisted of an artillery round alongside a road with a wired or wireless remote detonator. In 2007 U.S. Forces are facing more significant threats, such as Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP)s, designed to kill tanks, Bradleys, Light Armored Vehicles (LAV)s, Strikers, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) I Armored Vehicles, and significant overmatch for armored HMMWVs. New MRAP armored vehicles are designed to carry six to ten soldiers, providing the enemy with a larger target. Threats significantly overmatch all light armored vehicles. Underbody blasts significantly overmatch light armored vehicles, partly because such vehicles typically have flat bottoms and are low to the ground, partly because these existing vehicles' undercarriage provides no path for the explosive energy from an under-the-vehicle IED or other major explosive to escape and partly because of armoring that is insufficient against the explosive power used. Additionally, crew size is growing with new vehicles, the result of which is just a larger target.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
