Development and Characterization of Foam Filled Tubular Sections for Automotive Applications
Crash safety requirement without much penalty in structural weight of automotive structures has provided scope to fill hollow sections with foams. Different classes of foams are used for this purpose—polymer foams and metal foams. Metal foams are prepared
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Abstract Crash safety requirement without much penalty in structural weight of automotive structures has provided scope to fill hollow sections with foams. Different classes of foams are used for this purpose—polymer foams and metal foams. Metal foams are prepared out of light metals such as aluminum, magnesium, though occasionally steel foams are also suggested in the literature. This paper presents the results of crushing, bending and damping characteristics of steel extrusions with and without foam filling. Polymeric foam and aluminum foam are considered for this study. Based on the experimental study, the following observations are made: (a) The force verses displacement characteristics of aluminum foam filled tubes show large resistance (at higher loading rates) during axial crush; polymeric foam filling did not show such a marked improvement in energy absorption characteristics, (b) The bending resistance of aluminum foam filled sections shows an improvement in bending by 60–200 % during 3-point bend testing, and (c) Vibration levels are found to be reduced in lateral direction for foam filled sections. This foam filled section was tried on typical section of a twowheeler component. Keywords Foam filled sections foam Polymer foam
Vibration Crushing capability Aluminum
R. V. Prakash (&) Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600 036, India e-mail: [email protected] K. R. Babu TVS-Motor Company, Hosur, India
A. Chakrabarti and R. V. Prakash (eds.), ICoRD’13, Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering, DOI: 10.1007/978-81-322-1050-4_76, Ó Springer India 2013
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R. V. Prakash and K. R. Babu
1 Introduction Occupant safety is a prime concern in case of modern automobiles, and assessment of crashworthiness is an important stage in structural design. Crashworthiness represents a measure of the vehicle’s structural ability to plastically deform and yet maintain a sufficient survival space for its occupants in crashes involving reasonable deceleration loads. In this context, use of appropriate materials, design of safe crush zones and other methods such as passenger restraint systems, occupant packaging provide additional protection to reduce severe injuries and fatalities. To meet the requirements for improved safety, sometimes, thicker steel sheets or additional reinforcements are usually provided, which leads to a heavier bodyin-white. Therefore, it is necessary to improve crash safety while at the same time reducing the weight of vehicles for better performance. In order to achieve a safe automobile body in the event of a collision, deformation of the cabin structure should be minimized to protect the occupants, and the collision energy should be absorbed in a short deformation length within the crushable zones. However, the reaction force generally exceeds a certain value when a material with higher strength is used to build a car; new structures and materials are required for building the ideal car body that can absorb the collision energy in
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