Experimental and numerical crashworthiness investigation of hybrid composite aluminum tubes under dynamic axial and oblique loadings

This research deals with axial and oblique impact crash tests on simple and hybrid composite tubes. Axial and oblique impact tests have been generated on simple and hybrid composite tubes with one, two and three layers. A drop test rig was used to conduct the experiments. Furthermore, in order to gain more detailed knowledge about the crash process, finite element simulations of the experiments have been performed. The explicit finite element code LS-DYNA was used. The simple tube and the composite hybrid tubes are modeled with thin layer shell elements. The elastic-plastic material model was used for the aluminum tube and the Chang-Chang failure model was implemented for the composite layers. In terms of finding more efficient (higher energy absorption) and lighter crash absorbers particularly, the absorbed energy E and specific energy absorption SAE are considered in this research.