Axial Crashing of Folded Thin-Walled Tubular Structure with Various Cross-Sectional Shapes

Many thin-walled tubular structures have been widely applied to absorb the impact energy during vehicle crash accidents. Literatures prove that the energy absorption performance of the tubular structure is closely associated with its cross-sectional shape. Here in this paper, a series of folded tubular structures that have various cross-sectional shapes, including triangle, square, hexagon and circle, are proposed, and the crashworthiness characteristics of these structures are compared and analyzed based on finite element simulation. It is found that folded tubular structure with more cornered cross section has better energy absorption performance. The parametric analysis results also indicate that the energy absorption performance of the folded tubular structure improves with bigger thickness.