Energy absorption mechanism of axially-varying thickness (AVT) multicell thin-walled structures under out-of-plane loading

2019 ◽  
Vol 196 ◽  
pp. 109130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong Pang ◽  
Gang Zheng ◽  
Jianguang Fang ◽  
Dong Ruan ◽  
Guangyong Sun
Materials ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 666
Author(s):  
Kangjie Li ◽  
Yixiong Feng ◽  
Yicong Gao ◽  
Hao Zheng ◽  
Hao Qiu

Aluminum alloy thin-walled structures have been well used in applications of energy absorption. In the present work, a bioinspired design strategy for aluminum alloy thin-walled structures is proposed to improve the performance of out-of-plane crashworthiness by altering the material distribution. According to the proposed strategy, a novel fractal thin-walled triangle column (FTTC) is designed, which is composed by iteratively applying the affine transformation of a base triangle up to 2nd-order. The finite element model is established to investigate the out-of-plane crashworthiness of FTTC and validated by experiment results. The numerical analysis of the crashworthiness of FTTC with different fractal orders (0th, 1st and 2nd) are performed, and the results show that 1st- and 2nd-order FTTC enhance the energy absorption of structures and crush force efficiency. In particular, 2nd-order FTTC has better energy absorption ability due to the optimal distribution of materials, which are efficiently organized by the proposed bioinspired design strategy. In addition, a parameter study is performed to investigate the effect of FTTC geometric details on the crushing procedure. The collapse mode shows that it tends to change from unstable to stable with the increase in thickness and side length and the decrease in height. Moreover, a positive relevant relationship is identified between the thickness and the crashworthiness for FTTC.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1019 ◽  
pp. 96-102
Author(s):  
Ali Taherkhani ◽  
Ali Alavi Nia

In this study, the energy absorption capacity and crush strength of cylindrical thin-walled structures is investigated using nonlinear Finite Elements code LS-DYNA. For the thin-walled structure, Aluminum A6063 is used and its behaviour is modeled using power-law equation. In order to better investigate the performance of tubes, the simulation was also carried out on structures with other types of cross-sections such as triangle, square, rectangle, and hexagonal, and their results, namely, energy absorption, crush strength, peak load, and the displacement at the end of tubes was compared to each other. It was seen that the circular cross-section has the highest energy absorption capacity and crush strength, while they are the lowest for the triangular cross-section. It was concluded that increasing the number of sides increases the energy absorption capacity and the crush strength. On the other hand, by comparing the results between the square and rectangular cross-sections, it can be found out that eliminating the symmetry of the cross-section decreases the energy absorption capacity and the crush strength. The crush behaviour of the structure was also studied by changing the mass and the velocity of the striker, simultaneously while its total kinetic energy is kept constant. It was seen that the energy absorption of the structure is more sensitive to the striker velocity than its mass.


2017 ◽  
Vol 118 ◽  
pp. 214-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guangyong Sun ◽  
Tong Pang ◽  
Chenglong Xu ◽  
Gang Zheng ◽  
Jie Song

Author(s):  
Zhichao Li ◽  
Subhash Rakheja ◽  
Wen-Bin Shangguan

Thin-walled structures are widely used as energy absorbers in automotive vehicles due to their lightweight and high-energy absorption efficiency. In order to improve the energy absorption characteristics of thin-walled structures subjected to different loading angles, different types of novel multi-cell structures are proposed in this paper. The numerical method is used to study the crushing behaviors of the proposed multi-cell structures under different loading angles. It is found that the proposed multi-cell structures have considerably small initial peak force under axial load and avoid the appearance of global buckling deformation mode under oblique loads. Moreover, reasonably distributed wall thickness for each square tube in the thin-walled structure can enhance its energy absorption capacity under different loading angles.


Author(s):  
Manuel Martinez ◽  
Johane Bracamonte ◽  
Marco Gonzalez

Flexibility Factor is an important parameter for the design of piping system related to oil, gas and power industry. Elbows give a great flexibility to piping system, but where a trunnion is attached to an elbow in order to support vertical pipe sections, the piping flexibility is affected. Generally, determination of elbow flexibility factors has been performed by engineering codes such as ASME B31.3 or ASME B31.8, or using the Finite Element Method (FEM) and Finite Difference Method (FDM). In this work, bend flexibility factors for 3D models of piping elbows and piping elbows with trunnion attachments using the Boundary Element Method (BEM) are calculated. The BEM is a relatively new numerical method for this kind of analysis, for which only the surface of the problem needs to be discretized into elements reducing the dimensionality of the problem. This paper shows the simulation of 9 elbows with commercially available geometries and 29 geometries of elbows with trunnion attachments, 10 of them using commercial elbow dimensions, with applied in-plane and out-of-plane bending moments. Structured meshes are used for all surfaces, except the contact surface of elbow-trunnion joints, and no welded joints are simulated. The results show smaller values of flexibility factors of elbow and elbow–trunnion attachments in all loading cases if are compared to ASME B31.3 or correlations obtained from other works. The results also indicate that flexibility factor for elbow-trunnion attachment subjected to in-plane bending moment is greater than flexibility factor for out-of plane bending moment. Accuracy of BEM’s results were not good when flexibility characteristic values are lesser than 0.300, which confirm the problems of this numerical method with very thin-walled structures. The method of limit element could be used as tool of alternative analysis for the design of made high-pitched system, when the problem with very thin-walled structures is fixed.


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