Experimental and numerical study on crashworthiness of bionic hedgehog spine thin-walled structures

Natural impact-resistant biomaterials, with ingenious and exquisite geometric configurations, have resistance to external impact, and thus provide a perfect bionic example for the optimization design and crashworthiness improvement of new thin-walled structures. Based on the configuration characteristics of hedgehog spine, this paper designed the bulkheaded hedgehog spine thin-walled structure and studied the dynamic behavior of thin-walled structures under axial and oblique impact compression by combining 3D metal printing, quasi-static compression test and finite element simulation. The results show that the combined effect of the ribs, inner walls and bulkheads of the bulkheaded hedgehog spine thin-walled structure effectively improves its deformation coordination ability and crashworthiness. The specific energy absorption of the bulkheaded hedgehog spine thin-walled structure under axial or oblique impact is about 4.1, 2.1 and 1.4 times that of the single-wall cylinder, spider web and simplified hedgehog spine thin-walled structures, respectively.