Dynamic crashing and impact energy absorption of extruded aluminum square tubes

Abstract

The present article aims at investigating the compressive deformation behavior under dynamic loading to evaluate experimentally impact absorption energies of extruded aluminum tubes for space frame design. The dynamic compressive tests were conducted on three different extruded aluminum tube specimens of thicknesses 1.5, 2.0 and 3.0 mm using a high performance servo-hydraulic machine. As the strain rate increased, the size of plastic folds and the distance between folds tended to be non-uniform, but the calculated values of impact absorption energy were nearly constant. The number of plastic folds decreased by increasing the specimen thickness, and the impact absorption energies also decreased considerably as the tube specimens could not absorb energy effectively due to the presence of severe overall bending. To improve the impact absorption energy of the extruded tube for the space frame design, it is recommended to make the thickness of the extruded tube below 2.0 mm for the cross-section in the present study to promote folding formation instead of bending. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.