Search

In the present study, the crashworthiness and the numerical simulation of circular hybrid aluminium-CFRP tubes are investigated. It can be shown that hybrids provide significant lightweight potential. The specific energy absorption is 37% higher compared to a pure aluminium structure. The post-crash analysis is done by computed tomography methods. The failure of the hybrid component shows a mixture of energy absorption mechanisms of its pure materials. Hybrid-specific energy absorption mechanisms compensate the limited primary energy absorption mechanisms of the CFRP and metal components. The simulation of axial-loaded composite structures is challenging the currently available simulation methods. In the present work, a multi shell model is used for the simulation of the hybrid structure. This approach enables an efficient design of CFRP-aluminium hybrid components. First approaches towards the simulation of hybrid specific failure modes are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a prospective simulation method for composite crushing under axial crash loading is presented. To this end carbon fibre-reinforced plastic (CFRP) circular crash tubes are investigated in drop tower tests. Flat specimen tests are performed to determine calibration parameters and are used for efficient re-parameterization of a transversally isotropic material card used in finite element (FE) simulation. An existing material card for CFRP based on basic tension and compression tests is used as a starting point and only a small set of material parameters is numerically reasonable adjusted to account for crushing. Once calibrated by means of flat specimens the material model is able to cover a variety of different composite layups and specimen geometries, e.g. tube specimens. Therefore, numerical simulation of drop tower testing is carried out and results show good agreement between numerical and experimental results. In addition to these tests, it can be shown that the presented approach is leading to equally good results when the material and geometry of the specimens are changed to a glass fibre-reinforced plastic (GFRP) tube structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]