Underbody Blast Instrumentation Study (UBIS)

This study is designed to examine the performance of various accelerometer configurations in a blast situation related to various vehicle structures (e.g. M1A2, M1114, M915A3, etc.) – up to NAMC Member to choose which DoD ground vehicle environment to emulate. Four accelerometer configurations with off-the-shelf sensors will be tested simultaneously over three different blast loading levels. The data collected will be processed for statistical significance and the best performing configuration will be determined. The resulting acceleration data will be double integrated to determine displacement. A Dynamic Displacement Instrumentation System (DDIS) will be used to confirm displacement and strain distributions over instrumented test samples. A re-useable blast testing fixture would need to be fabricated to accommodate the various instrumentation configurations. This fixture would need to be repairable and would require replacement of expendable components that could degrade from one test to the next. This fixture would be a simple structure used to characterize the sensors (not used to simulate a complete vehicle). This fixture would incorporate and enable situations that would be representative of problem areas seen in vehicle testing. The fixture would also need to be designed to be compatible with TARDEC’s Dynamic Deformation Instrumentation System (DDIS), which will be used to verify the actual dynamic deformation of the area of interest where the various accelerometer configurations would be mounted.