Investigation on crushing behavior of laminated conical absorbers with different arrangements under axial loading

In this paper, the crushing properties of conical tubes made of stainless steel 430 have been investigated with different arrangements under quasi-static axial load both experimentally and numerically. For numerical investigation, nonlinear finite element method simulation is conducted using LS-Dyna software. In the experimental tests, the specimens with the height, major diameter, minor diameter and thickness of 150, 70, 50 and 1 mm are considered, respectively. Different combinations of layers are prepared using different cross-sections. A total of seven different arrangements have been designed in three distinct groups with constant mass and the crushing behavior has been extracted for them. To ensure the validity of the simulation results, several specimens which have the thickness of 1 mm have been tested experimentally. Comparing the results indicates the consistency of the experimental and numerical data. According to the obtained results, it is observed that with increasing the number of layers, the energy absorption capacity is increased; moreover, the peak load is increased by 75.2%. In fact, with increasing the number of layers, increasing trend is observed in peak load, and contrary to the initial expectations, this trend is not linear. It is also observed that by changing the layer arrangement and the layer number, the mean crushing force can increase approximately three times.