Crashworthiness of Filament Wound CFRP Origami Tubes

Abstract

In recent years, the crashworthiness of thin-walled volumetric origami architectures havestudied extensively as they have been found to provide more stable and progressive collapse modes compared with traditional straight-walled tubes. They can also dissipate similar levels of energy absorption per mass. Therefore, pre-folded origami tubes show great potential as crash boxes. They can be improved further by coupling them with composites which possess weight saving advantages over metals. The brittle failure of composites, which is not always conducive to improved energy absorption, can be improved with origami creases. However, the corrugated shapes are challenging to manufacture and current fabrication methods employ stamping and/or vacuum bagging which cannot be easily implemented on industrial scales. In this work, we consider utilizing the Kresling origami architecture which possessescreases that can guide a smooth coupled axial-twisting collapse in its unit cells. We begin by detailing a novel filament winding method for efficient fabrication of these tubes from carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRPs). Second, we explore the quasi-static compressive behavior of the tubes by developing a finite element model that is calibrated using experimental data. A parametric analysis is conducted with an experimentally verified model to determine which geometric parameters are important to tune for superior crashworthiness to straight-walled cylinders. As an extension of our parametric study, we will explore the compressive behavior ofconcave cylinders that are derived from Kresling origami unit cells when the number of sides are allowed to approach infinity. We slightly modify our manufacturing approach for these cylinders and compare their energy absorption capabilities with that of straight-walled cylinders. Finally, we numerically and experimentally demonstrate the ability of CFRP Kreslingorigami tubes to provide a more stable collapse compared to straight-walled tubes while absorbing comparable amounts of energy per mass in the quasi-static collapse case. This requires a non-uniform unit cell geometry configuration. We only consider the quasi-static case due to limitations with our impact tester. We will confirm that this geometry can maintain its progressive cascading collapse under dynamic loading conditions to validate the superior crashworthiness of these composite Kresling origami tubes. With improved manufacturing, we believe our Kresling origami crash boxes can improve further and be utilized for industrial applications.