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 n, the number of plates n, and the ratio of width of small square w to width of big square w of the pyramid cell η. 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 n = 5, n = 11 and η = 0.38 was obtained. The specific energy absorption increased by 143.76% compared with the initial configuration.