Enhanced energy absorption of assembled honeycomb system under in-plane compression

Abstract

Honeycomb structures are widely used for energy-absorption subjected to in-plane and out-of-plane crushing loads. In our previous work, a self-locking honeycomb was proposed for energy absorption under out-of-plane compression, achieving an effective balance between fabrication cost and energy absorption performance in high energy absorption scenarios. However, the honeycomb energy-absorbing performance is obviously insufficient due to the degradation of self-locking stiffness for in-plane compression. To further improve the energy-absorbing performance of the honeycomb structure under in-plane loading, this paper adopts a foam-filling strategy to achieve the performance enhancement of the self-locking honeycomb structure. Firstly, the energy absorption characteristics of the self-locking structure during in-plane compression were investigated by numerical simulation. Secondly, relevant experiments were carried out to verify the accuracy of the simulation results. In addition, a theoretical model is proposed to quickly predict the structural energy absorption for in-plane compression. Finally, the effects of different compression velocities and boundary conditions on the structural energy absorption were analyzed. It is indicated that the foam-filled self-locking honeycomb structure can effectively enhance the energy-absorbing performance under out-of-plane loading, and provide effective stiffness constraints for the deformation of the bending plate inside the locking nodes to maximize the energy-absorbing efficiency. In particular, the energy-absorbing performance of the foam-filled self-locking honeycomb structure of the basic cell bending plate is closely related to the loading velocity and the boundary constraints, and the energy-absorbing efficiency can be further enhanced by setting the boundary constraints in the energy-absorbing structure design.