New protective solutions against blast for landed applications – BLAST3D+

Armoured land vehicles are ballistic and blast protected (mines threats or Improvised Explosive Devices, IEDs). For blast protection, protection is mainly insured with metallic reinforced structure. This concept has been combat proven. However, payload of vehicles has been reduced with this kind of solutions and light vehicles cannot use such heavy solutions. Therefore, for weight issue or in order to increase protection level, composite material used as up-armouring of the vehicle can prove to be an innovative solution and allow the weight reduction in the overall armouring solution. Thus in the BLAST3D+ project, different configurations of material combinations (composite or others) will be submitted to blast to understand their dynamic behaviour. Fibrous reinforcement used in composite material will be made with multi-layers textile structures with different multi-directional orientations of yarns. Blast has different behaviour if it is used in open field (essentially representing IED types of threat) or buried mine, material responses will be evaluated and compared in both cases. Based on the blast phenomenon analysis, different composite-metallic hybrid architectures will be designed, produced and tested at low value of the explosive charge, to compare the solutions, and at high value of the explosive charge to identify the optimal protection solution. A law of behaviour of the metallic/composite structure submitted to blast will be so determined for blast threat.