Influence of tube arrangement and core types on the crushing performance of core-filled nested and adjoined structures

This study investigates the influence of tube arrangement and core filling on the crashworthiness performance of three tube architectures namely nested (NRT and NST), single (SingleT) and adjoined (ART). Experimental and numerical analyses, along with a Random Forest machine learning model, were employed to investigate their response under crushing conditions. Unfilled NRT and NST tubes demonstrated notably higher mean crushing load (MCL) and crushing load ratio (CLR) compared to SingleT and ART, with increases of 69.8% and 17.14% for MCL and 85.55% and 60.77% for CLR, respectively. The Entropy-EDAS method highlighted NST1 as the most effective unfilled design. For core-filled tubes, the crashworthiness was governed by a combination of tube arrangement, cross-sectional geometry and core filling. However, in unfilled samples, only the tube arrangement and cross-section played a significant role in the crash behavior. Among the core-filled samples, ART structures exhibited superior improvements in CLR and crushing behavior compared to their unfilled counterparts, with perpendicular arrangements showing the most significant enhancement. The specific energy absorption (SEA) of ART1(FEA) and ART2(FEA) core-filled tubes surpassed their unfilled counterparts by approximately 26.84% and 40.36%, respectively. Furthermore, core type 2 (C2) consistently outperformed core type 1 (C1), with ART2(FEA)_C2 showing a 12–14% improvement in crashworthiness metrics. The integration of materials with varying Young’s moduli, such as combining ART tubes with ABS cores, was found to significantly enhance crashworthiness, particularly when the tubes were arranged perpendicularly.

Citation

Doan, T., Arjunan, A., Tran, T. et al. (2025) Influence of tube arrangement and core types on the crushing performance of core-filled nested and adjoined structures. International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-025-16921-w

Type

Journal article

Language

en

Description

This is an author's accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer on 19/11/2025, available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-025-16921-w For re-use please see Springer's terms and conditions.

ISSN

0268-3768

EISSN

1433-3015

Collections

Faculty of Science and Engineering