A novel tailor-made technique for enhancing the crashworthiness by multi-stage tubular square tubes

Abstract

State-of-the-art studies of the energy absorption systems reveal various techniques for enhancing the crashworthiness of a structure, and each technique has its benefits and drawbacks. For crashworthy designers, it is a challenge to design an efficient energy absorbing system which fulfills its requirements in terms of crashworthiness. Therefore, this paper proposes tailor-made technique for crashworthiness design by performing a combination of two or more energy absorption techniques to fulfill the crashworthy designer requirements. The tailor-made technique is adapted to have the ability of implementation by different structural configurations; thus, tubular square tubes configuration has been utilized as an example. Tailor-made technique implementation is validated experimentally and numerically under quasi-static and axial impact loading, afterwards, its merits are discussed through conducting a comparative study. Results show that the novel tailor-made technique provides the designers the flexibility in designing of the protected structure. Furthermore, tailor-made technique improves the crashworthiness of the energy absorbing system in terms of crushing performance and energy absorption capacity. Moreover, it leads to energy absorbing systems applicable to a wide range of impact velocities through generating low reaction force under low impact velocity and logical crushing force under high impact velocity.