T90 HE vs M1 ABRAMS | OVERPRESSURE SIMULATION | 125mm High Explosive Armour Penetration

Simulating the effects of a 125mm high explosive pressure wave on the Abrams' hull roof and fighting compartment. The model investigates how the blast wave propagates through the tank and determines how lethal it is by measuring the overpressure inside the vehicle.

The 3OF26 HE projectile has over 3kg of RDX and can penetrate around 45mm of steel; in this simulation the projectile detonates above the hull roof, which is often stated to be 1.5" thick (38.1mm) [5]. The shrapnel from the HE round is ignored for simplicity and to purely focus on the pressure effects.

To Note:
The 3OF26 projectile has been simplified, with the filler material being purely RDX instead of a mixture of other materials. This is due to material properties not being available for the complex mixture.
The armour values and geometry of the Abrams is approximated based on whats available publicly, as the true design is classified.
The small regions of pressure which develop around the rigid body, or in some cases where the pressure penetrates the rigid bodies are due to the air elements being on both sides of the rigid body at once -this is because the elements aren't small enough. These larger elements also cause instability in the model which caused it to crash, hence why some of the simulations are cut short. This could not be improved as I had already reached the node limit of the software I was using.

Material properties, armour, and projectile geometries were all taken from literature:

[1] RHA: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/28829...
[2] Air: https://osf.io/f8awq/download/?versio...
[3] RDX: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
[4] 3OF26: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/125_mm_...
[5] Abrams Armour: https://aw.my.games/sites/aw.my.com/f...

This real-world overpressure effect has recently been implemented into the video game Warthunder...but not very accurately.

Abaqus FEA was used with a Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian model, with Johnson-Cook material properties for steel, ideal gas for air, and JWL for RDX.