Numerical Analysis of Energy Absorption Ability of Polygonal Tubes under Crushing

Abstract

Honeycomb panels are used mostly in energy absorption application in engineering fields such as aerospace, transportation and packaging, etc. Honeycomb panels have good stiffness and are weight efficient structures. The honeycomb core consists of cellular cells. The core cell’s geometry of honeycomb affects the energy absorption ability. In this study, the different geometries of individual cell are analysed in tube form. Tubes of different geometries like square, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, circle etc, of equal masses and same thickness are modeled with the help of modelling tool CATIA and then numerically analysed with the help of non-linear explicit finite element code LS-DYNA under axial crushing. With the help of LS-Pre-post tool pre-processing such as modelling and post-processing such as collapse pattern of different tubes are performed and investigated respectively. Aluminium alloy is used for material of tubes in analysis. When tubes are collapsed, they generate folds. The collapsing pattern and number of folds generated are analysed. Curves between load and displacement are plotted and analysed in terms of their initial peak load and energy absorbed in tubes. It is found that square tube has minimum initial peak load and circular tube has large energy absorption and acceptable initial peak load. With the increase of number of sides of tube, the energy absorption ability as well as mean load to crush the tube increases.