Abstract

The smooth thin shell structure has exhibited significant advantages in light weight and high energy absorption and been widely applied in transportation, aerospace fields. This study proposed the thin-walled square tube filled with hollow aluminum metal spheres (TST-HS) to improve the crashworthiness. In this structure, hollow aluminum spheres were filled into thin-walled square tubes in different stacking modes, such as simple cubic (SC), body-centered cubic(BCC), and face-centered cubic (FCC). A series of quasi-static compression experiments and numerical simulations were conducted to investigate the deformation mechanism and crashworthiness of TST-HS. The results indicated that filled hollow spheres lead to the change in the deformation mode and an increase in the number of plastic hinges of TST-HS. The mean load of TST-HS was increased by 68.98% and 15.6%, respectively, compared to the square tubes and the foam-filled tube of same mass. Parametric studies show that the wall thickness, size and stacking modes of the hollow spheres have major impacts on the crashworthiness of the TST-HS. Energy analysis reveals the contribution of the interaction between hollow sphere and square tube to the total energy absorption of TST-HS.

Full Text
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