UNCLASSIFED: DISTRIBUTION A. APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE UNCLASSIFED: DISTRIBUTION A. APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE A Conformal, Fully-Conservative Approach for Predicting Blast Effects on Ground Vehicles

A new blast code, Loci/BLAST, has been coupled with the commercial structural dynamics package LS-DYNA to provide a fully-coupled simulation strategy for predicting the effects of blast on a ground vehicle. Loci/BLAST is a fully-conservative, computational fluid dynamics code with the capability to model soil and blast using a multi-species formulation with advanced equations of state. The two-way coupling between Loci/BLAST and LS-DYNA provides a robust mechanism for predicting the blast-induced deformation of structural elements with no topology changes. The efficacy of the resulting software is demonstrated by comparisons of predicted deformations for a constrained plate with experimental data. Results are also presented for a notional hull subjected to the effects of detonation of a buried IED. Predicting the effects of a blast on a vehicle and its occupants due to the detonation of an improvised explosive device (IED) is a challenging task. In addition to the effects of the blast, the effects of soil, which could have a high water content, must also be included. An attractive strategy, which is much less costly than experimental approaches, is to employ numerical simulations to predict these complex interactions. The fidelity of th