Crashworthiness analysis of foam-filled square column considering strain rate effect of the foam

This paper presents results on the crushing behavior of aluminum foam-filled columns with square cross section. Here, the effect of inserting an aluminum foam to single-walled and double-walled columns were studied. Parametric study for both types of columns compared with single-walled and double-walled columns were also carried out. In this work, the effect of strain rate of the aluminum foam was considered in the material model. The numerical results were compared with the available experimental data and shown to be in a very good agreement. The models that considered the strain rate effect of foam core gave better predictions compared to the ones without considering the strain rate effect. It will result in higher energy absorption and bigger local deformation on corners resulting a slightly increase of the overall crushing force. It can be said that the strain rate of the foam core plays a quite significant role in crushing behavior of the foam-filled columns, and should be taken into account. The results also showed that the interaction between the foam core and the column wall will change the deformation mode from one localized fold to multiple propagating folds and lead to the increase of total mean crushing force of the column. Similar effect of foam filling was also found in double-walled foam-filled columns. Further investigation has been conducted on the effect of core thickness to the mean crushing force response of the columns. It is also found that increasing the core thickness in double-walled foam-filled column will improve the crushing behavior up to a point where there is still interaction between the walls. After that, the further increase of the core thickness will make the column response approaching the crushing force of single-walled foam-filled.