Deformation, energy absorption and crushing behavior of single-, double- and multi-wall foam filled square and circular tubes

•In the present investigation, in-house developed aluminum foam is characterized for their mechanical behavior.•This foam is used as filler materials for understanding the effect of foam in multi wall tubes deformation under impact loading for square and circular configurations.•Results show the effect of foam filling in the case of multi-walled structures and their deformation modes under impact loading.

Deformation and energy absorption studies with single, double and multi-wall square and circular tube structure with and without aluminum foam core are carried out for assessing its effectiveness in crashworthiness under the identical test conditions. Modeling and numerical simulation of aluminum foam filled square tubes under axial impact loading is presented. The foam-filled thin-walled square tubes are modeled as shell wherein, foam core is modeled by incorporating visco-elastic plastic foam model in Altair® RADIOSSTM. It is observed that the multi-wall tube structure with foam core alters the deformation modes considerably and results in substantial increase in energy absorption capacity in comparison with the single and multi-wall tube without foam core. Moreover, the multi-wall tube foam filled structure shows mixed deformation modes due to the significant effect of stress wave propagation. This study will help automotive industry to design superior crashworthy components with multi-tube foam filled structures and will reduce the experimental trials by conducting the numerical simulations.