Experimental Comparison of the Energy Absorption Performance of Traditional Lattice and Novel Lattice Filled Tubes

Abstract

In this study, β-Ti3Au lattice structure was proposed for the first time in the literature as a filling material to increase the energy absorption performance of thin-walled tubes. In this context, the energy absorption performances of conventional lattice structure (i.e., body-centered cubic unit cell (BCC) and face-centered cubic unit cell (FCC)) filled thin-walled tubes and proposed novel β-Ti3Au lattice structure filled thin-walled tubes with proposed were compared experimentally under quasi-static compression load. BCC hybrid, FCC hybrid and β-Ti3Au hybrid structures produced by additive manufacturing technology using PA2200 powder were crushed and evaluated by considering various crashworthiness criteria such as total energy absorption (EA) and specific energy absorption (SEA). The results showed that the β-Ti3Au hybrid structures are better crashworthiness performance than that of traditional filling BCC and FCC lattice structure filled thin-walled tubes. In particular, the β-Ti3Au hybrid structure has 18.17% and 19.39% higher EA values than BCC hybrid and FCC hybrid, respectively. These values are 16.50% and 15.66% for SEA values, respectively. As a result, the current investigation showed that the suggested β-Ti3Au lattice structures as a filler material can be a significant alternative for applications where energy absorption performance is critical.