Drop Weight Impact Behaviour of Tube Filled Polymeric Syntactic Foam

Abstract

Accidents are misfortune which could happen to anyone at any place at any time and it affects the vehicle as well as the occupants. Continuous research is being carried out for improving the crashworthiness of the vehicles with different materials. These materials plays important aspect in energy absorption and impact resistant design of the structure, wherein, presence of these materials highly affects the response of structures subjected to impact loading. In the present study, a non-linear finite element code LS-DYNA^® is used for numerical simulation of drop weight impact hammer test. The material chosen for simulated testing is polymeric syntactic foam. In this study, effect of density of foam, foam material model, effect of drop height and effect of tube, filled with foam, on energy absorption of foam is studied. Herein, material model chosen for hammer is bilinear material model and crushable foam as well as piecewise linear plasticity model is used to model the foam. Behaviour of foam is compared in terms of reaction force, displacement time history and force-displacement variation. Energy absorption for each model is computed for different velocities considered in the present study and it is observed that tube plays an important role in enhancing the energy absorption of foam.