The study on the buckling instability of the expansion tube type crash energy absorber by using the FEM

FEM을 이용한 확관형 충돌에너지 흡수부재의 좌굴불안전성에 관한 연구

The crash energy absorbers used in the trains normally are classified into two types. The first is the structure type, which mainly used in not only the primary structure of train but also the crash energy absorbers at the critical accidents. The second is the module type, which just absorbs the crash energy independently and attached onto the structures of the trains. The expansion tube is widely used as the module type of the crash energy absorbers, especially in the trains that have a heavy mass. Since the crash energy is absorbed by means of expanding the tube in the radial direction, the features of the expansion tube have the uniform load during the compression. As the uniform load remains in sudden impact, the expansion tube is effective to decrease acceleration of passengers when the train accident occur. The buckling instability of the expansion tubes is affected by the boundary conditions, thickness and length of tube. In this study, the effects of the length and thickness of the expansion tubes under the arbitrary load on the buckling are studied using the ABAQUS/standard and ABAQUS/explicit, a commercial finite element analysis program, and then presents the guideline to design the expansion tubes. The analysis processes to compute the buckling load consist of the linear buckling analysis and the nonlinear post-buckling analysis. To analysis the nonlinear post-buckling analysis, the geometry imperfections are introduced by applying the linear buckling modes to nonlinear post-buckling analysis.