Numerical study on axial crushing of auxetic foam-filled square tube

Abstract

Filling the thin-walled tubes with a foam core is a typical method to enhance the energy absorption performance and stabilize their crushing responses under impact loading. Recently, auxetic foam material with negative Poisson’s ratio has gained remarkable popularity as an effective candidate to enhance the energy absorption capability of structures. In this paper, polyurethane auxetic foam is suggested as a foam core with the negative Poisson’s ratio of-0.31. Numerical simulation was performed to quantify the crush characteristics of auxetic foam-filled square aluminum tubes for variations in initial width of tube under quasi-static axial loading using the nonlinear finite element (FE) code LS-Dyna. Based on the numerical results, the influence of tube width was quantified in terms of energy absorption (EA), specific energy absorption (SEA), initial peak force (Pmax) and crush force efficiency (CFE). It is found that the progressive collapse and deformation modes of auxetic foam-filled tube (AFFT) is pronouncedly affected by varying the tube width. Furthermore, the SEA of AFFT is remarkably sensitive to the tube width variations, yet show low sensitivity to the EA of AFFT. The present study provides new design information on the crush response and energy absorption performance of auxetic foam-filled square tube with varying tube width.