Crashworthiness design of thin-walled curved beams with box and channel cross sections

This paper presents a crashworthiness design of thin-walled curved steel beams with box and channel cross section. Three parameters are chosen as design variables and optimised to acquire the maximisation of the beam's energy absorption capacity during crashes. In this study, the thin-walled curved beam's energy absorption capacity is expressed in terms of the specific energy absorption (SEA), and the response surface method is employed to formulate the SEA as a function of the three design variables. Finite element (FE) models for such beams are created and used for crashworthiness analyses for the objective of deriving such functions. After having the optimal designs, the effects of the design variables on the curved beam's crash performance are investigated through parametric studies. Finally, simplified FE models are created for the thin-walled curved beams again and used for the same optimisation problem. The optimal designs obtained from the simplified FE models are compared to the previous ones to validate the simplified FE models as well as the simplified modelling method.