Crushing Analysis of Tapered Ellipse Tubes Under Oblique Impact Loading

In this paper, a class of axisymmetric thin-walled tubes with two types of geometries (straight and tapered) and four kinds of cross-sections (square, rectangle, circle, ellipse) are considered as energy absorbing components under oblique impact loading. The crash behavior of these tubes are first investigated by nonlinear finite element analysis through LS-DYNA. It is found that the tapered tubes has the better crashworthiness performance than the straight ones under oblique impact regarding both specific energy absorption (SEA) and peak crushing force (PCF). Among the tapered tubes, the tapered ellipse tube (TET) has the best crashworthiness performance. Then by calculating the overall SEA considering load angle uncertainty effect, it is found that the weighting factors for different load angles are critical for evaluating the crashworthiness performance of the tubes.