Crushing analysis and multi-objective crashworthiness optimization of multi-cell conical tube subjected to oblique loading

Abstract

In this article, a novel multi-cell conical tube is designed. First, a detail analysis about the crashworthiness of three structures, that is, the multi-cell conical tube, multi-cell square tapered tube, and fourfold-cell conical tube, is made and compared at the condition of keeping the same mass with different oblique load angles. Then, the influences of the internal cell walls, load angle, the cone angle, and wall thickness on the performances of crashworthiness are investigated. The multi-cell conical tube has better energy absorption capacity than multi-cell square tapered tube and fourfold-cell conical tube at small load angles. The normalization of average gradients of the cone angle on specific energy absorption reached 48.25% compared with the wall thickness. The full factorial design and the optimal Latin hypercube design method are adopted to define the sample points and error analysis points. A numerical simulation on the sample points and error analysis points are performed using Abaqus/Explicit. According to different working conditions, different optimization objects are determined, and corresponding surrogate models with different indicators are constructed using Kriging method. The accuracy of surrogate model is evaluated. The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II is utilized to optimize the multi-objective problem. Finally, the influence of structural parameters on crashworthiness is discussed.