NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF CONVEX AND CONCAVE TUBES WITH CONSIDERATION OF STRAIN RATE SENSITIVITY

摘要

The present paper deals with the application of the explicit finite element code, PAM-CRASH, to simulate the crash behavior of steel thin-walled tubes with various cross-sections subjected to axial loading. An isotropic elastic, linear strain-hardening material model was used in the finite element analysis and the strain-rate sensitivity of mild steel was modeled by using the Cowper-Symonds constitutive equation with modified coefficients. The modified coefficients were applied in numerical collapse simulations of 11 types of thin-walled polygon tubes: 7 convex polygon tubes and 4 concave polygon tubes. The results show that the thin hexagonal tube and the thick octagonal tube showed relatively good performance within the convex polygon tubes. The crush strengths of the hexagonal and octagonal tubes increased by about 20% and 25% from the crush strength of the square tube, respectively. Among the concave tubes, the I-type tube showed the best performance. Its crush strength was about 50% higher than the crush strength of the square tube.