Crashworthiness Design for Novel Polygonal Asymmetric Origami Tubes

Origami tubes have attracted widespread attention because it is inclined to deform in the complete diamond mode (DM) with a low initial peak force Fmax and high average crushing force Fave. Although conventional origami tubes can improve crashworthiness, there are still many areas that fail to generate traveling plastic hinge lines, and the crashworthiness can be further improved. This paper presents a novel polygonal asymmetric origami tube (PAT) with origami patterns that can trigger more traveling plastic hinge lines compared to those of conventional origami patterns. The theoretical analysis of the deformation mechanism suggests that the PAT can realize hierarchical deformation and avoid stress concentration at sharp corners. The quasi-static experiments and numerical simulations reveal that the novel origami pattern can successfully trigger up to four times more traveling plastic hinge lines than the conventional square box (CSB) under the premise that each plastic hinge line is similar in length. Compared with the CSB, the PAT can deform in DM with a 56.0 % reduction of Fmax and a 59.1 % increase of Fave. Notably, the stableness of load-carrying capacity SLC is 90.2 %, which is 260.8 % higher than the CSB. A series of parametric studies reveal that the dihedral angle ratio α / β and the width-to-thickness ratio c / t of the PAT have a significant effect on crashworthiness. A smaller ratio of α / β and c / t provides the PAT with superior crashworthiness. Comparing the PAT with other types of origami tubes and multi-cell tubes indicates that the PAT also exhibits outstanding crashworthiness. The impact experiments also unveil a significantly enhanced crashworthiness of the PAT. Compared with the CSB, the Fmax decreases by approximately 46.4 %, while the Fave increases by around 92.7 %. The SLC and SEA values for the PAT surpass those of the CSB by about 260.8 % and 93.1 %, respectively. Furthermore, the theoretical analysis for predicting the Fave of the PAT is developed, with a maximum error not exceeding 8.5 %.