On the crashworthiness analysis and design of a lateral corrugated tube with a sinusoidal cross-section

Thin-walled structures have been widely used as energy absorbers due to their light weight, high energy absorption efficiency and good machinability. However, the existing researches mainly focus on different sizes of tubes with the same shape, but the topological relationship of cross-sectional shape also has an important effect on the energy absorption of structure. In view of the fact that the existing corrugated tubes are mainly studied about the corrugation in the axial direction, we put forward a new type of lateral corrugated tube (LCTs) with a sinusoidal cross-section. The evolution of its cross-section could be controlled through the amplitude (A), the basic nominal diameter (R0) and the number of corrugations (N). In the meantime, a systematic crashworthiness study is carried out with multi-objective optimization design. The results show that A, N and the wall thickness (t) are the important parameters that affect the deformation mode and crashworthiness. Numerical simulation of axial compression of 16 different LCTs with different A and N shows that when N = 6 and N = 8, the SEA of the LCTs are increased by 27.91% and 27.24% respectively compared with that of the ordinary circular tube (CTs). Subsequently, the optimal Latin hypercube design method is used to determine the sample points and Kriging method is used to construct the surrogate models of specific energy absorption (SEA) and initial peak force. Finally, the multi-objective optimization of LCTs and CTs are carried out by using the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II. The optimization results show that the LCTs has better crashworthiness than CTs, and the SEA is increased by 53.65% compared with the optimized design of the CTs. Compared with CTs, the SEA of the LCTs can be extended to a wider area, indicating that the LCTs has a wider range of application and design space than CTs.