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 must dissipate during a collision to prevent damage and injury. To reduce loss from collision, energy absorbers are used that dissipate energy upon deformation and folding to prevent damage to critical parts of a structure. In this paper, simple and multi-cell thin-walled tubes made from aluminum with triangular, square, hexagonal and octagonal sections were subjected to quasi-static loading. The experimental results were then compared with numerical simulations. The results showed that the energy absorption capacity of multi-cell sections is greater than for that of simple sections. Also, hexagonal and octagonal sections in a multi-cell configuration absorbed the greatest amounts of energy per unit of mass.

Comparative analysis of energy absorption capacity of simple and multi-cell thin-walled tubes with triangular, square, hexagonal and octagonal sections

Multi-cell tubes have been drawn increasing attention for their excellent energy-absorbing ability. However, the effect of cell number and oblique loads on crashing behaviors has seldom been studied to date. In this paper, a group of multi-cell tubes with different cell numbers were comprehensively investigated under both axial and oblique loads. The finite element models were first established and then validated by experimental tests. The simulation results showed that the increase in cell number can be beneficial to the energy absorption ( EA ) but detrimental due to increase in peak force ( F max ) under axial load. When the oblique loads were taken into account, the tubes could undergo global bending, which is an inefficient deformation mode. By applying complex proportional assessment (COPRAS) method, the 7×7 tube was selected as the best based on multi-criteria under multiple loading angles. Then the Kriging modeling technique and multiobjective particle optimization (MOPSO) algorithm were integrated to address the optimization problems, where EA and F max were taken as objectives and tube sizes as design variables. The results demonstrated that different loading angles have different requirements on cell allocation and optimizations of multiple load cases (MLC) can yield better solutions in a weighted average fashion, whereas the optimization for separate single load cases (SLC) could result in inferior performance under other load cases.

On design of multi-cell tubes under axial and oblique impact loads

Crashworthiness analysis and design of multi-cell hexagonal columns under multiple loading cases

On design of multi-cell thin-wall structures for crashworthiness

Due to increasing applications of thin-walled structures, especially as energy absorber, considerable researches have been made about them In this paper, firstly, behavior of simple and multi-cell square tubes with equal cells is studied analytically, experimentally and numerically Then, it is shown that for 3×3 square tubes with unequal cells, adding the partitions at corners increases energy absorption capacity of the tubes Furthermore, the Zhang's formula for prediction of mean crushing load (MCL) is revised to inclusion of unequal cells square tubes; then, analytical and numerical results are validated with experiments Finally, it is shown that the energy absorption capacity of the proposed new multi-cell square section is about 227% greater than that of simple section

M. Parsapour

Papers

Comparative analysis of energy absorption capacity of simple and multi-cell thin-walled tubes with triangular, square, hexagonal and octagonal sections

An investigation on the energy absorption characteristics of multi-cell square tubes