Investigation on structure optimization of crashworthiness of fiber reinforced polymers materials

Composite materials, in most cases fiber reinforced polymers, are nowadays used in the aerospace and transportation, in which high specific energy absorption (SEA) and strength are critical issues. Aimed at the improvement of SEA and the peak impact load (P), the structure optimization of composite tape sinusoidal specimen and corresponding experiments are investigated in this paper. Firstly, the finite element model of composite tape sinusoidal specimen is constructed and is validated by experiments. Then, both the single-objective and multi-objective optimizations are performed for composite tape sinusoidal specimen under axial impact loading. At last, the optimal results are validated by experiments. The optimal results show that the SAE increases 67.8% (from 51.3666 kJ/kg to 88.887 kJ/kg) and the P decreases 42.9% (from 34.9936 kN to 20.178 kN). This work lays a foundation for structural design of crashworthiness using fiber reinforced polymers materials.