Loading of vehicle undercarriages from the detonation of shallow-buried explosives remains a serious threat to life in conflict and post-conflict zones. One method to protect lightly-armoured vehicles is to retrofit them with appliqué armour, which must be strong enough to provide adequate protection, but light enough to maintain vehicle manoeuvrability. A key performance metric of this armour is its deformation under loading, which must be limited to avoid impact upon vehicle occupants. The high-strength steel Armox 440T is commonly used due to its high load capacity, strength-to-weight ratio, ductility and low cost: as other protection systems are developed, it would be of great benefit to compare their deformation against an Armox 440T benchmark. However, no definitive benchmarking study has been published to date, mainly due to the difficulties in ensuring repeatable loading from complex buried detonations.

This paper presents experiments which underpin such a benchmarking study, building on the authors’ previous work to establish a methodology which produces very consistent loading from shallow-buried detonations. Tests were conducted with a range of explosive masses and plate thicknesses, with target plates secured in a purpose-designed frame to produce simple, consistent boundary conditions. Plate deformations captured by stereo high-speed digital image correlation were compared to a commonly-used low-cost peak deflection method. High-speed digital image correlation was found to make highly reproducible displacement measurements with a standard deviation of 2% of the mean. The low-cost method provided slightly higher variability up to 5% of the mean value, and measurements of peak deformation were systematically 20% higher, but in a consistent manner, with a low unit cost and without risk to expensive test equipment. The low-cost method therefore allowed the development of a multivariate regression relationship between deformation, charge size and plate thickness, which provides a benchmark for the assessment of future protection solutions.

浅埋炸药爆炸引起的车辆起落架的装载仍然是冲突和冲突后地区生命的严重威胁。保护轻型装甲车辆的一种方法是用贴花甲进行改装，该贴花甲必须足够坚固以提供足够的保护，但要轻巧以保持车辆的机动性。该装甲的关键性能指标是其在负载下的变形，必须限制变形以避免对乘员造成影响。高强度钢Armox 440T因其高负载能力，强度重量比，延展性和低成本而被普遍使用：随着其他防护系统的发展，将其变形与Armox 440T进行比较将非常有益基准。但是，迄今为止，尚未发布任何权威的基准测试研究，

本文介绍了基于基准研究的实验，这些实验是在作者先前的工作基础上建立的，该方法可以从浅埋爆轰产生非常一致的载荷。在一定范围的炸药质量和板厚下进行了测试，将目标板固定在专门设计的框架中，以产生简单，一致的边界条件。将通过立体高速数字图像相关性捕获的板变形与常用的低成本峰值偏转方法进行了比较。发现高速数字图像相关可以进行高度可重复的位移测量，其标准偏差为平均值的2％。低成本方法提供的变异性略高，最高可达平均值的5％，而峰形变形的测量值总体上要高20％，但以一致的方式，具有较低的单位成本，并且无需担心昂贵的测试设备。因此，低成本方法允许在变形，装药量和板厚之间建立多元回归关系，这为评估未来的保护解决方案提供了基准。