Thin-walled tubes are extensively used as energy absorption structures in the design of passive safety components in transportation industry. Improving crashworthiness performance and deformation modes of thin-walled tubes are of primary significance for vehicle and passenger safety because thin-walled tubes are the most common and economical energy absorption structures. Therefore, this study examines the crashworthiness performance of different cross-sectional tubular sections to measure their efficiency for an optimum crash-box design. To perform this task, various sections, such as triangle, quadrate, pentagon, hexagon and various types of circular configurations are investigated, numerically. Nine different thin-walled tubes with a nominal diameter of 80mm and length of 150mm are modelled. The thickness of the tubes is selected to be 1mm and Al6060-T6 alloy with a yield strength of 277.5MPa, tangent modulus of 700MPa and Young’s modulus of 68.1GPa is considered for the numerical study. An explicit solution scheme is adopted with a period of 0.005s in ANSYS Workbench. For the loading condition, a speed of 20m/s is applied in the axial direction through a rigid plate during a stroke length of 100mm to simulate a realistic crash scenario. In conclusion, the design combining the multi-cell configurations (e.g. trefoil and quatrefoil) can dramatically improve the crashworthiness performance of thin-walled tubes; therefore, these configurations can be implemented for efficient energy absorption in the automobile and rail-vehicle industries. It is noted that the triangle and quadrate geometries cannot improve energy absorption capacity and desired deformation mode of the thin-walled tubes under axial-compression conditions.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Energy absorption, Axial-compression, Thin-walled structure, Finite element analysis
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