Experimentally Study On Energy Absorption Characteristics Of Thin-walled Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics(CFRP) Structures

Lightweight technology is the crux of new energy vehicles industrialization,compared with the conventional metallic materials for cars,CFRP(Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics)is the most potential automotive lightweight materials due to the many structural and performance advantages they provide.The key to the application of composite materials in the automotive industry is to ensure the safety performance of the vehicles and to realize the lightweight structure.Many related investigators have done a lot of research on the crashworthiness of thin-walled energy-absorbing composite structures,however,the energy absorption characteristics of composite materials and structures have not been fully revealed.To further explore the crashworthy characteristics of thin-walled conventional metal and CFRP circular tubes,a series of comparative experiments were carried out,the specific contents of this paper are as follows:(1)Thin-walled empty circular CFRP tubes were experimentally investigated for their failure mechanisms and energy-absorbing capacities under axial quasi-static crushing.The effects of length-to-diameter ratios and ply numbers of empty CFRP tube on crashworthiness were also studied.(2)Thin-walled CFRP/Aluminum/Steel circular tubes,lightweight cellular materials(aluminum foam,aluminum honeycomb)and thin-walled foam-/honeycomb-filled tubes were experimentally investigated for their crashworthiness under axial quasi-static compression.The interaction effect between thin-walled tubes and lightweight fillers were also studied.(3)Thin-walled circular aluminum and CFRP tubes were experimentally investigated for their crashworthiness under quasi-static axial and off-axial compression.The tests were conducted at four different loading angles of 0°,5°,10°and 20° to the tubal axis,respectively,and four sets of specific fixtures were fabricated to apply desired off-axial loads onto the aluminum and CFRP specimens,respectively.The failure modes,crushing force and energy absorption,etc,of all crashworthiness indicators were presented to explore the effect of loading angle.