Browsing by Subject "Crashworthiness"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Design of an Origami Patterned Pre-Folded Thin Walled Tubular Structure for Crashworthiness
    (2019-05) Chaudhari, Prathamesh; Tovar, Andres; Nematollahi, Khosrow; El-Mounayri, Hazim A.
    Thin walled tubular structures are widely used in the automotive industry because of its weight to energy absorption advantage. A lot of research has been done in different cross sectional shapes and different tapered designs, with design for manufacturability in mind, to achieve high specific energy absorption. In this study a novel type of tubular structure is proposed, in which predesigned origami initiators are introduced into conventional square tubes. The crease pattern is designed to achieve extensional collapse mode which results in decreasing the initial buckling forces and at the same time acts as a fold initiator, helping to achieve a extensional collapse mode. The influence of various design parameters of the origami pattern on the mechanical properties (crushing force and deceleration) are extensively investigated using finite element modelling. Thus, showing a predictable and stable collapse behavior. This pattern can be stamped out of a thin sheet of material. The results showed that a properly designed origami pattern can consistently trigger a extensional collapse mode which can significantly lower the peak values of crushing forces and deceleration without compromising on the mean values. Also, a comparison has been made with the behavior of proposed origami pattern for extensional mode verses origami pattern with diamond fold.
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    Multiobjective Optimization of Composite Square Tube for Crashworthiness Requirements Using Artificial Neural Network and Genetic Algorithm
    (2021-12) Zende, Pradnya; Dalir, Hamid; Agarwal, Mangilal; Tovar, Andres
    Design optimization of composite structures is of importance in the automotive, aerospace, and energy industry. The majority of optimization methods applied to laminated composites consider linear or simplified nonlinear models. Also, various techniques lack the ability to consider the composite failure criteria. Using artificial neural networks approximates the objective function to make it possible to use other techniques to solve the optimization problem. The present work describes an optimization process used to find the optimum design to meet crashworthiness requirements which includes minimizing peak crushing force and specific energy absorption for a square tube. The design variables include the number of plies, ply angle and ply thickness of the square tube. To obtain an effective approximation an artificial neural network (ANN) is used. Training data for the artificial neural network is obtained by crash analysis of a square tube for various samples using LS DYNA. The sampling plan is created using Latin Hypercube Sampling. The square tube is considered to be impacted by the rigid wall with fixed velocity and rigid body acceleration, force versus displacement curves are plotted to obtain values for crushing force, deceleration, crush length and specific energy absorbed. The optimized values for the square tube to fulfill the crashworthiness requirements are obtained using an artificial neural network combined with Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithms (MOGA). MOGA finds optimum values in the feasible design space. Optimal solutions obtained are presented by the Pareto frontier curve. The optimization is performed with accuracy considering 5% error.
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    Origami Inspired Design of Thin Walled Tubular Structures for Impact Loading
    (2019-08) Shinde, Shantanu R.; Tovar, Andres; Nematollahi, Khosrow; Dalir, Hamid
    Thin-walled structures find wide applications in the automotive industry as energy absorption devices. A great deal of research has been conducted to design thin-walled structures, where the main objective is to reduce peak crushing forces and increase energy absorption capacity. With the advancement of computers and mathematics, it has been possible to develop 2D patterns which when folded turn into complex 3D structures. This technology can be used to develop patterns for getting structures with desired properties. In this study, square origami tubes with folding pattern (Yoshimura pattern) is designed and studied extensively using numerical analysis. An accurate Finite Element Model (FEM) is developed to conduct the numerical analysis. A parametric study was conducted to study the influence of geometric parameters on the mechanical properties like peak crushing force, mean crushing force, load uniformity and maximum intrusion, when subjected to dynamic loading. The results from this analysis are studied and various conclusions are drawn. It is found that, when the tube is folded with the pattern having specific dimensions, the performance is enhanced significantly, with predictable and stable collapse. It is also found that the stiffness of the module varies with geometrical parameters. With a proper study it is possible to develop origami structures with functionally graded stiffness, the performance of which can be tuned as per requirement, hence, showing promising capabilities as an energy absorption device where progressive collapse from near to end impact end is desired.
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    Structural Optimization of Thin Walled Tubular Structure for Crashworthiness
    (2014) Shinde, Satyajeet Suresh; Tovar, Andrés; Anwar, Sohel; Wasfy, Tamer
    Crashworthiness design is gaining more importance in the automotive industry due to high competition and tight safety norms. Further there is a need for light weight structures in the automotive design. Structural optimization in last two decades have been widely explored to improve existing designs or conceive new designs with better crashworthiness and reduced mass. Although many gradient based and heuristic methods for topology and topometry based crashworthiness design are available these days, most of them result in stiff structures that are suitable only for a set of vehicle components in which maximizing the energy absorption or minimizing the intrusion is the main concern. However, there are some other components in a vehicle structure that should have characteristics of both stiffness and flexibility. Moreover, the load paths within the structure and potential buckle modes also play an important role in efficient functioning of such components. For example, the front bumper, side frame rails, steering column, and occupant protection devices like the knee bolster should all exhibit controlled deformation and collapse behavior. This investigation introduces a methodology to design dynamically crushed thin-walled tubular structures for crashworthiness applications. Due to their low cost, high energy absorption efficiency, and capacity to withstand long strokes, thin-walled tubular structures are extensively used in the automotive industry. Tubular structures subjected to impact loading may undergo three modes of deformation: progressive crushing/buckling, dynamic plastic buckling, and global bending or Euler-type buckling. Of these, progressive buckling is the most desirable mode of collapse because it leads to a desirable deformation characteristic, low peak reaction force, and higher energy absorption efficiency. Progressive buckling is generally observed under pure axial loading; however, during an actual crash event, tubular structures are often subjected to oblique impact loads in which Euler-type buckling is the dominating mode of deformation. This undesired behavior severely reduces the energy absorption capability of the tubular structure. The design methodology presented in this paper relies on the ability of a compliant mechanism to transfer displacement and/or force from an input to desired output port locations. The suitable output port locations are utilized to enforce desired buckle zones, mitigating the natural Euler-type buckling effect. The problem addressed in this investigation is to find the thickness distribution of a thin-walled structure and the output port locations that maximizes the energy absorption while maintaining the peak reaction force at a prescribed limit. The underlying design for thickness distribution follows a uniform mutual potential energy density under a dynamic impact event. Nonlinear explicit finite element code LS-DYNA is used to simulate tubular structures under crash loading. Biologically inspired hybrid cellular automaton (HCA) method is used to drive the design process. Results are demonstrated on long straight and S-rail tubes subject to oblique loading, achieving progressive crushing in most cases.
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    Topology design of vehicle structures for crashworthiness using variable design time
    (2017-12) Tapkir, Prasad; Tovar, Andres; Chen, Jie; Nematollahi, Khosrow
    The passenger safety is one of the most important factors in the automotive industries. At the same time, in order to improve the overall efficiency of passenger cars, lightweight structures are preferred while designing the vehicle structures. Among various structural optimization techniques, topology optimization techniques are usually preferred to address the issue of crashworthiness. The hybrid cellular automaton (HCA) is a truly nonlinear explicit topology design method developed for obtaining conceptual designs of crashworthy vehicle components. In comparison to linear implicit methods, such as equivalent static loads, and partially nonlinear implicit methods, the HCA method fully captures all the relevant aspect of a fully nonlinear, transient dynamic crash simulation. Traditionally, the focus of the HCA method has been on designing load paths in the crash component that increase the uniform internal energy absorption ability; thus far, other relevant crashworthiness indicators such as peak crushing force and displacement have been less studied. The objective of this research is to extend the HCA method to synthesize load paths to obtain the different acceleration-displacement profiles, which allow reduced peak crushing force as well as reduced penetration during a crash event. To achieve this goal, this work introduces the concept of achieving uniform energy distribution at variable design simulation times. In the proposed work, the design time is used as a new design parameter in topology optimization. The desired volume fraction of the final design and the design time provided two dimensional design space for topology optimization, which is followed by the formulation of design of experiments (DOEs). The nonlinear analyses of the corresponding DOEs are performed using nonlinear explicit code LS-DYNA, which is followed by topology synthesis in HCA. The performance of the resulting structures showed that the short design times lead to design obtained by linear optimizers, while long simulation times lead to designs obtained by the traditional HCA method. To achieve the target crucial crash responses such as maximum acceleration and maximum displacement of the structure under the dynamic load, the geological predictor has been implemented. The concept of design time is further developed to improve structural performance of a vehicle component under the multiple loads using the method of multi-design time. Finally, the design time is implemented to generated merged designs by performing binary operations on topology-optimized designs. Numerical example of the simplified front frame is utilized to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach.