The influence of triggers geometry upon the stiffness of cylindrical thin walled tubes

Today’s automobile manufacturers are increasingly using lightweight materials to reduce weight; these include plastics, composites, aluminium, magnesium alloys, and also new types of high strength steels. Many of these materials have limited strength or ductility, therefore in many cases the rupture being serious consequences during crashes, underscore Picketta et al. in their studies.Automotive structures must deform plastically in a short period of time, a few milliseconds, to absorb the crash energy in a controllable manner. It must be light and enable economically mass-production [1].FE models rapidly gained acceptance among engineers. Many other factors facilitated the development of vehicle models by shell finite elements since most of the geometry of the structural surfaces was already on computer graphic files.Kee Poong Kim and Hoon Huh emphasize that the crashworthiness of each vehicle part needs to be evaluated at the initial stage of design for good performance of an assembled vehicle. As the dynamic behaviour of structural members is different from the static one, the crashworthiness of the vehicle structures has to be assessed by impact analysis.The paper analyzes the influence of trigger geometry upon the compression of thin-walled cylindrical tubes. Simulations performed on a simple model showed the dependence between triggers area and deformation times as well as the maximum deformations obtained for various speeds at which the simulations ware carried out. Likewise, the geometry of trigger leads to different results.