Design optimization for protective shell of hydrogen cylinder for vehicle based on NPR structure

Abstract

Aiming at reducing the energy absorption of the hydrogen cylinder for fuel cell vehicles in collision, which may lead to fierce explosion, this paper introduces an energy-absorbing protective shell combining with negative Poisson’s ratio (NPR) structure to the hydrogen cylinder. It adopts three honeycomb structures of the same mass and three kinds of aluminum alloy to determine the optimal structure and material scheme of the protective shell. Besides, sensitivity analysis is selected to screen the design parameters of the optimal structure scheme. Based on this, the overall mass of the designed protective shell, the specific energy absorption of NPR structure, the maximum impact force of rigid wall, and the maximum stress of the liner are taken to establish the optimization mathematical model. Furthermore, adaptive mutation genetic algorithm (AMGA), non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-ii (NSGA-II), and adaptive simulated annealing algorithm (ASA) are exerted as the optimization algorithms separately to conduct optimization design and a comparison is made between the optimization results. The results show that the optimized energy-absorbing protective shell has better crashworthiness and energy absorption effect, which can effectively improve the collision safety of the hydrogen cylinder. It provides a new idea for the protection design of hydrogen storage system in fuel cells in the future.