Over the past several decades, a noticeable amount of research efforts has been directed to minimising injuries and death to people inside a structure that is subjected to an impact loading. Thin-walled (TW) tubular components have been widely employed in energy absorbing structures to alleviate the detrimental effects of an impact loading during a collision event and thus enhance the crashworthiness performance of a structure. Comprehensive knowledge of the material properties and the structural behaviour of various TW components under various loading conditions is essential for designing an effective energy absorbing system. In this paper, based on a broad survey of the literature, a comprehensive overview of the recent developments in the area of crashworthiness performance of TW tubes is given with a special focus on the topics that emerged in the last ten years such as crashworthiness optimisation design and energy absorbing responses of unconventional TW components including multi-cells tubes, functionally graded thickness tubes and functionally graded foam filled tubes. Due to the huge number of studies that analysed and assessed the energy absorption behaviour of various TW components, this paper presents only a review of the crashworthiness behaviour of the components that can be used in vehicles structures including hollow and foam-filled TW tubes under lateral, axial, oblique and bending loading.

https://myresearchspace.uws.ac.uk/ws/files/1765038/Paper_2.pdf

On the crashworthiness performance of thin-walled energy absorbers: Recent advances and future developments

Energy absorption of metal, composite and metal/composite hybrid structures under oblique crushing loading

For better crashworthiness performance, vehicles must protect its occupants by maintaining structural integrity and converting the large amount of kinetic energy into other forms of energy in a controllable and predictable manner in a crash situation. In doing so, lower crushing force would provide better safety for the vehicle occupants. This paper reviews the axial response of “modified” tubular sections with imperfections and fillers subjected to axial impact loads relevant to the field of structural crashworthiness. The use of imperfections sets the mode and initiation of collapse of a tube at a specific location and reduces the maximum crush force, hence improving the energy-absorbing characteristics of tubular structures. The types of imperfections discussed include prebuckle, parallel and dished indentations, cutouts, stiffeners, fillers, and wrapping. DOI: 10.1115/1.2885138

Ku Hyun Kim

Papers

Axial crush and bending collapse of an aluminum/GFRP hybrid square tube and its energy absorption capability