IBD Deisenroth Engineering was a German company specializing in the design of

armor Armour (British English) or armor (American English; see spelling differences) is a covering used to protect an object, individual, or vehicle from physical injury or damage, especially direct contact weapons or projectiles during combat, or fr ...

for military vehicles. They formed in 1981 to develop applications of a new

explosive An explosive (or explosive material) is a reactive substance that contains a great amount of potential energy that can produce an explosion if released suddenly, usually accompanied by the production of light, heat, sound, and pressure. An expl ...

suitable for use in

explosive reactive armor Reactive armour is a type of vehicle armour that reacts in some way to the impact of a weapon to reduce the damage done to the vehicle being protected. It is most effective in protecting against shaped charges and specially hardened kinetic ene ...

(ERA). Through the 1980s, they developed many individual applications for the

Bundeswehr The ''Bundeswehr'' (, meaning literally: ''Federal Defence'') is the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany. The ''Bundeswehr'' is divided into a military part (armed forces or ''Streitkräfte'') and a civil part, the military part con ...

. In 1994, they introduced their

MEXAS The Modular Expandable Armor System (MEXAS) is a composite armour system developed by the German company IBD Deisenroth Engineering. MEXAS was introduced in 1994 and has been applied on over 20,000 combat vehicles worldwide. The successor of MEXAS ...

armor systems using ceramic armor which were very popular as upgrade systems for a wide range of armored vehicles, mostly in

NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two No ...

. MEXAS was replaced by

AMAP AMAP is a multiple sequence alignment program based on sequence annealing. This approach consists of building up the multiple alignment one match at a time, thereby circumventing many of the problems of progressive alignment. The AMAP parameters ...

in 2006, which includes a wide variety of modular armor, both active and passive. The company started a production arm in 1991, Chempro. Chempro was purchased by

Rheinmetall Rheinmetall AG is a German automotive and arms manufacturer, headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. Its shares are traded on the Frankfurt stock exchange. History Rheinmetall was founded in 1889. Banker and investor Lorenz Zuckermandel L ...

in 2007 and merged it with their existing ammunition division to form Rheinmetall Chempro. The two companies formed ADS Protection the same year to produce an active armor system ("hard kill"). On 1 June 2019, Rheinmetall purchased most remaining assets of IBD Deisenroth and formed Rheinmetall Protection Systems GmbH.

References

German companies established in 1981 {{Germany-company-stub