Design and Crashworthiness Analysis of Novel Petal-Inspired Pentagonal Fractal Structure

Inspired by the structure of petals, a novel Petal-inspired Pentagonal Fractal (PPF) structure was proposed, and its crashworthiness performance was analyzed via finite element simulations. The proposed PPF exhibits superior energy-absorbing capacity compared with the conventional pentagonal tube. Compared with a conventional pentagonal tube, the energy absorption of PPF with the 3rd level increases by 110.08% and its Peak Crushing Force (PCF) decreases by 11.26% at the same mass. The crashworthiness of PPF can be improved by appropriately increasing wall thickness without surpassing the PCF limit. Moreover, the effects of the wall thickness gradient ([Formula: see text]) on the crashworthiness performance of PPF and the Petal-inspired Pentagonal Gradient Fractal Foam-filled Tube (PPGF-[Formula: see text]-FFT) were systematically investigated.