Energy Absorption Analysis Of Thin-walled Structures Under Axially Impact

Impact event is always a fatal and unavoidable issue for car-making, ship-making, spaceflight making industry. Weight-saving and impact safety requirements are calling for the application of light-weight materials and structures with high specific energy absorption to vehicles. Thin-walled structures, metallic foam-filled thin-walled columns, corrugated tubes have a good energy absorption capacity, the research method of these structures has always been the combination of experiment and computer simulation. Compared with experiment, digital simulation has advantages of less experiment budget, short developing period, wide range of research and being free from the experiment conditions.In this article, we simulate the deformation process of these structures under axial crushing. First, the basic principles, thoughts and implementing method of explicit FEM have been discussed theoretically, then some of the key techniques of FE modeling and difficult problems are argued. All these are done for the built of a correct and high efficient FE analysis model. Then a numerical simulation of the impact event was carried out using the FE code ANSYS10.0/LS-DYNA version 970. Model our structure in ANSYS, obtain the explicit dynamic solute on via LS-DYNA. The collapse profile and crushing force, energy absorption, energy absorbed per unit mass were given and compared. The influences of the section shape, impact velocity, material of the extrusions and foam density are investigated. According to the finite element analysis, we try to propose some more efficient impact energy absorption structures to achieve saving material and reducing weight in engineering design.