This research work investigated the axial crushing behavior of a circular aluminum extrusion in alloy AA6063-T5 filled with polymeric foam and a glass-fiber structure. The components were experimentally tested under quasi-static and impact loading conditions supported by a material testing campaign. Energy absorption, crush force efficiency and specific energy absorption were experimentally measured in order to assess the performance of a design proposal. Besides, the interaction effects between the different materials has been analyzed in depth and compared to the results for aluminum foam filled extrusions available in the literature. The confinement effect of the foam on the glass fiber plates has been found to have a very remarkable contribution to the energy absorption levels of the component, whereas a negligible foam-extrusion interaction was observed due to the gaps in the initial geometry of the specimen. The investigated component show an overall good performance, specially in terms of crush force efficiency. However, the specific energy absorption of the component was reduced by approximately 10 % compared to the aluminum extrusion alone.
Fuel efficiency and occupant safety are two of the most important concerns in the automotive industry nowadays. Encouraged by the importance of this field of study, this research attempts an improvement in the crashworthiness of a vehicle crash absorber. This component consists in a square hollow steel tube filled with a honeycomb structure made of glass-fiber reinforced polyamide. Surrogate-based optimization techniques are used. The three objective functions chosen-mass, absorbed energy and peak load-are approximated by two different models: multivariate adaptive regression splines and gaussian process (kriging). The thickness of both parts, the shape of the honeycomb and its height are selected as design variables. Two preliminary analyses of the specimen are performed: the computation of the interaction effect and a comparison of a hollow tube with the specimen. From the results of multi-objective crashworthiness optimization two Pareto frontiers are obtained, one for the absorbed energy and mass, and another one for the absorbed energy and peak load. The results achieved show great improvements on all objective functions compared to the original design. The peak load is reduced by 37% on a specimen with similar mass and absorbed energy, and the specific energy absorbed is increased by 39.5% for a specimen with a similar peak load to the one from the initial model.
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