Crushing characteristics and energy absorption behaviour of sloped-truncated origami tube

Abstract

Thin-walled tubes with origami patterns show an expectable crushing mechanism, leading to a better energy absorption performance of lower initial peak force and smoother crushing process than conventional tube. In this study, a sloped-truncated origami tube (STOT), presenting variable stiffness in layers, was proposed. The crushing mode, crushing response and energy absorption performance of the STOT compared with those of tubes with parallel-truncated origami pattern (PTOT) and Miura-ori pattern (MOT) are experimentally investigated and validated through finite element method. A parametric study is conducted to investigate the effects of sloped-truncated ratio, number of layers and dihedral angle on the crushing process and energy absorption performance of the proposed STOT. Results show that the STOT with appropriate geometric parameters performed a desirable crushing process, characterized by without excessive initial peak force, followed by a smoothly increasing compression force. Comparison results show that the STOT is the best design for energy absorption device for its comparable value of specific energy absorption (SEA) and crushing force efficiency (CFE). The STOT, with optimized geometries achieves a 21.84 % increase in SEA and a 104.19 % improvement in CFE compared to the conventional square tube counterpart. Additionally, compared to its MOT counterpart, the proposed STOT exhibits superior performance in P_m and SEA. This study offers new insights into the origami-inspired design and low-stiffness initiation of the crushing mode in patterned thin-walled tubes, achieving a balance between energy absorption and geometric parameters.