Crashworthiness design for foam filled thin-wall structures

To improve crushing energy absorption, aluminum foam has been adopted as one of new filler materials in impact engineering. Introduction of the foam material alters the crash behavior of structural component and necessitates exploration of more sophisticated design optimization methodology. In this regard, various surrogate model techniques have been extensively exploited to seek optimal crashworthiness design for thin-walled structures. This paper aimed at developing a multiobjective optimization framework for thin-walled column with aluminum foam-filler. As a typical sectional structure, squared columns were taken into account as a demonstrative example in this study. Higher order response surfaces were constructed for energy absorption and peak crushing force, which was validated by comparing against various close-form solutions published in literature. The difference between the single-objective and multiple-objective optimizations was discussed in a Pareto sense and the importance to seek for multiobjective optimization was highlighted.