Investigation on crashworthiness and mechanism of a bionic antler-like gradient thin-walled structure

Inspired by an impact-resistant antler, a novel size-gradient thin-walled structure is designed as an energy absorber. Its crashworthiness and mechanism are investigated by finite element simulation. The results show that the bionic-antler gradient structure has excellent crashworthiness performance with the specific energy absorption (SEA) of 2.17 and 1.29 times that of cylinder and fractal spider web, respectively, and the crushing force efficiency as high as 91.54%. Furthermore, when its SEA is the same as that of the fractal spider web, the peak crushing force can be reduced by 35%. The bionic-antler gradient structure produces many folds due to small folding wavelength, which expands the scope of energy storage area and improves the value of energy storage. Increasing properly the cell size-gradient or decreasing the average cell size can further enhance the crashworthiness performance of the bionic-antler gradient structure.