Abstract
This paper presents experimental and numerical investigation on the parameters effecting energy absorption capability of composite tubular structures at oblique loading to improve crashworthiness performance. Various inclined angles of 5°, 10°, 20° and 30° were selected for the study of off-axis loading. The results indicate that by increasing the lateral inclination angle the mean crushing force and also energy absorption capability of all tested sections decreased. From design perspective, it is necessary to investigate the parameters effecting this phenomenon. The off-axis loading effect that causes significant reduction in energy absorption was investigated and the effected parameters were improved to increase energy absorption capability. To establish this study, 10° off-axis loading was chosen to illustrate the obtained improvement in energy absorption capability. Five cases were studied with combinations of ply-orientation and flat trimming with 45° chamfer. This method was applied to the integrated 10° off-axis loading and the final results showed significant improvement in energy absorption capability of composite absorbers. Finite element model (FEM) was developed to simulate the crushing process of axial and off-axis composite section in LS-DYNA and the results were in good agreement with the experimental data.
Highlights
The ability of a structure providing protection for occupants by absorbing the applied energy through controlled failure modes in case of an impact is known as structural crashworthiness
It was prevailing that at 10 ̊ the energy absorption was significantly increased, in contrast, [8] the author studied cylindrical GFRP composite section and concluded that the increase in lateral inclination angle causes a significant drop in energy absorption and this is due to the geometry differences of two studies
The results indicated that as the lateral incline angle increases the mean crush force and energy absorption decreases
Summary
The ability of a structure providing protection for occupants by absorbing the applied energy through controlled failure modes in case of an impact is known as structural crashworthiness. Ghasemnejad subjected to impact enables reduction of overall damage to the main body structure and most importantly provides greater passenger safety. The major design parameter is aligned with passenger safety; materials with high energy absorption capabilities are developed for light-weighting-safety trade-off. Composite materials such as FRPs compared to metallic structures have higher stiffness-to-weight and strength-to-weight ratio that enables an outstanding lightweight crashworthiness characteristic including excellent specific energy absorption (SEA) due to its crushing behaviour [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
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