Crashworthiness Research Of Thin-walled Metal Structures For Vehicle Front Rail

The human’s life is more fast and efficient with the rapid development of vehicle industry. More and more cars take convenience to people. But they are also leading to traffic accidents which cause a serious threat to people’s lives and property at the same time. Reducing the hazards in traffic accidents has been one of the most important goals in the design of vehicles.Improving the structural crashworthiness of the car in an accident becomes an important issue in the field of vehicle safety research and development. It means to improve the abilities of absorbing energy and protect the occupant through its structure deformation when the accident happens. The metal thin-walled tube is the most typical and effective energy absorbing structure due to its stable deformation mode. It can easily absorb energy by controlling the buckling deformation of itself. It plays an important role in body energy absorption system. Therefore, the energy absorption of metal thin-walled tube, become an important way to improve the car’s passive safety.A large number of experimental studies have shown that the deformation mode of thin-walled tube has relationships with its own geometric parameters. These geometric parameters include cross-sectional shape, wall thickness of thin-walled tube, tube body length and taper and so on. In this paper, the metal thin-walled tube is the object of study. We use the HYPERMESH and LS-DYNA to study the energy absorbing performance of metal thin-walled tubes under axial impact. First, the energy absorption of single-cell tubes and multi-cell tubes under pure axial impact is study. Then we combine the multi-cell tubes’ energy absorbing advantages with tapered tubes’stabilities and create a new type of cone multi-cell tube based on the probability of oblique impact greater in actual collision. It proves that the SEA of tapered multi-cell tubes under oblique impact loading is higher and the peak force is lower through numerical simulation method. It also analyzed the effect of the load angle, impact velocities and structural design parameters to the energy absorption characteristics of tapered multi-cell thin-walled square tubes under oblique impact. It provides a basis for optimization design of such structural’s crashworthiness.