Crashworthiness analysis of a multi-layered bi-directionally corrugated steel plates structure.

This paper proposed a multi-layered bi-directionally corrugated plates structure (BCPS) for energy absorption. Quasi-static compression experiments and finite element method (FEM) were used to investigate the crushing performance of the multi-layered BCPS. The results showed that the multi-layered BCPS had very small initial peak crushing force, and the fluctuation of force was very small during the whole compression process. These characteristics made the multi-layered BCPS more advantageous in crashworthiness than traditional structures. It was also found that the crushing performance of the multi-layered BCPS was very sensitive to the geometrical parameters, such as the number of the cellular structures along the width , the number of plates , and the ratio of width of small square to width of big square of the pyramid cell . Therefore, parameters optimization was carried out using the Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm to find the best geometrical configuration of the structure. After optimization, the optimum parameters = 5, = 11 and = 0.38 was obtained. The specific energy absorption increased by 143.76% compared with the initial configuration.