Innovative Body Structures and Materials for Manned, Unmanned and Alternative Vehicles

Principal Investigators
Noboru Kikuchi, Zheng-Dong Ma (U. of Michigan)

Industry
Bing C. Chen (Rockwell Scientific Company LLC)
Ciro A. Soto (Ford Scientific Research Lab)

Government
Farzad Rostam-Abadi, Krishan D. Bishnoi (TARDEC)

Student
Dong Wook Lee (U. of Michigan)

A major concern with the state-of-the-art underbody protection technology is that installing a protective structure under the vehicle chassis usually requires raising the vehicle CG (center of gravity), which may result in problems with maneuvering, vehicle rollover, and an increased foot-print – ultimately affecting vehicle’s mobility and survivability. Using the new morphing body technology, the vehicle body can reconfigure itself from a normal working state to blast protective mode upon detection of an explosive blast. This avoids the above mentioned problems by raising the CG minimally, thus reducing the risk to both crew and vehicle.

Since blast energy is released within an extremely short period of time (less than 1 ms), it is very difficult for materials to be able to absorb the majority of blast energy in such a short period of impact. In order to protect the crew members inside the vehicle and to maintain integrity of the main structure, protection under the vehicle body needs to be redesigned. The successfully developed new technology and resultant crew/vehicle protection kit will increase crew survivability of tactical wheeled vehicles subject to mine blast. For commercial vehicles, conventional safety equipments, such as air bags, seat belts, and various crash avoidance devices, have been developed as standard in most commercial vehicles. However, breakthrough technology is still a key requirement for meeting future demands on vehicle design for improved safety with lighter weight and higher mobility.

An innovative inflatable body concept, called “I-bumper” has been developed in the previous years for improved crashworthiness and safety of military and commercial vehicles. The developed I-bumper concept has several active structural components, including a morphing mechanism, a movable bumper, two explosive airbags, and a morphing lattice structure, and filled granular materials for absorbing crash energy during a vehicular crash. The objective of the current research is to further the technologies developed in the I-bumper for more general applications in manned, unmanned and alternative vehicles. The focus will be on developing a new and fundamental design methodology with associated enabling numerical capabilities for a novel vehicle underbody structure that can morph its shape from normal to blast protective configuration upon blast detection and can be installed in current and future tactical vehicle systems for crew and vehicle protection from landmine blast and improvised explosive device (IED) assaults. Objectives of the proposed research include: