Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2017
24th ABCM International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Numerical study on the performance of square tubes as energy absorbers
Submission Author:
José Carlos de Souza Teles , GO
Co-Authors:
José Carlos de Souza Teles, RITA DE SILVA, Alessandro Oliveira
Presenter: José Carlos de Souza Teles
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2017.COB17-0745
Abstract
This work consists in a numerical study on the performance of square tubes under quasi-static progressive buckling, where strain rate and inertial forces are not considered. Such shell structures have been applied in vehicles as passive safety device. In fact, they may reduce or avoid passengers to suffer severe or fatal injuries in case of frontal crashes. In this context, simulations using FEM (Finite Element Method) are performed to evaluate the behaviour of such structures loaded under axial crushing. For this, some parameters such as tube wall thickness and type of material are assessed in the performance of the energy absorbers during a crushing process. The energy absorbed is calculated using the load-displacement curve obtained from simulations and comparisons among these values are done in order to verify the influence of the changes in the parameters studied. In this work, the effect of changes in wall thickness and material properties are studied by analysing the variation in the energy absorbed, specific energy absorption, load peak, and mean crushing load, which are crashworthiness parameters explained in section 1. The results showed that all crashworthiness parameters considered varies when the wall thickness and material properties are changed. Also, variations on the collapsible profile of the specimens were observed.
Keywords
Crushing, energy absorbers, crash box
