Crash Sled Testing of Triaxially Braided CFRP for Improved Vehicular Crashworthiness

摘要

The Impact Dynamics Laboratory at NASA Glenn Research Center recently developed a pneumatically actuated crash sled for investigating the crush behavior of structural elements for vehicular applications. The apparatus includes an adjustable striker mass and specimen support mass, which are mounted on separate rails. This setup provides two advantages over crash sleds with so-called fixed specimen supports: (1) it allows for multiple independent measurements of the crush response using different instruments; and (2) the specimen support can be varied and its reaction can be explicitly measured. This paper describes the experimental setup and data analysis methodology and illustrates the capability of the sled for measuring the specific energy absorption (SEA) of triaxially braided carbon/epoxy composite C-channels and corrugated plates. The corrugated plate had a higher SEA than the C-channel, and the SEAs did not vary when the striker mass and velocity were changed so that incident energy was constant.