A Novel Auxetic Honeycomb Cylindrical Structure for Enhanced Energy Absorption

An excellent energy absorption device (EAD) should have a low initial peak crushing force (IPCF) and a high specific energy absorption (SEA), while traditional re-entrant honeycomb cylindrical structures are still difficult to comprehensively consider these properties. Here, we develop a novel honeycomb cylindrical structure, called as re-entrant combined-wall honeycomb cylindrical structure (RCW-HCS), to enhanced the energy absorption capability of the traditional re-entrant honeycomb cylindrical structure (RE-HCS). By adjusting structural parameters, two additional structures, called as RCW-D1-HCS and RCW-D2-HCS, were derived for comparison. Numerical models were established to study the crushing responses of the proposed structures, in which the deformation modes, force-displacement and SEA were analyzed systematically. Results show that the proposed RCW-HCS has a high crushing force and SEA value than the RE-HCS, due to the transformation of its deformation modes. Compared with other structures, the RCW-HCS has the lowest IPCF, and its crushing force efficiency (CFE) is the largest with the value about 0.8. The derived two structures have significantly improvements in SEA values, while their CFEs are still low due to the relatively high IPCF. Therefore, it can be concluded that the proposed RCE-HCS has an improved energy absorption capability, which deserve more attention in future works.