A Study on Design of Fiber-Reinforced Plastic (FRP) Tubes as Energy Absorption Element in Vehicles

Abstract

To date, the global automotive industry is arguably the largest and most complex undertaking in industrial history. However, where cars multiply twice as fast as people, the automobile accidents old as automobiles themselves increased correspondingly. A car accident is a road traffic incident which usually involves at least one road vehicle being in collision with which may result in injury, property damage, sometimes even death at serious situations. Up to now, road traffic injuries represent about 25% of worldwide injuryrelated deaths as the leading cause. Facing the transport safety problem, policymakers in government of all over the world are doing their efforts e.g. NHTSA of USA. On the other hand, the automakers are also putting their emphasis in the increasing of the production quality particularly their crashworthiness and crash compatibility. Till now, many products including bumper, seat belt, airbag, anti-lock braking system (ABS) are proved useful to secure the occupant from a collision or a sudden stop and therefore already required as the mandatory equipments. Additionally, for scientists and engineers, in the late of 1990’s, a particular international conference and a journal publication on crashworthiness well known as ICRASH and IJCRASH were formed and provide them a platform to discuss and present their works in the field of structural crashworthiness and impact biomechanics. Besides safety, the automobile have another serious problem i.e. pollution. Most automobiles in use today are propelled by gasoline or diesel. When it runs on the road, it creates a lot of exhaust gas such as NOx that pollute the air and CO2 which is one major causes of global warming. With the increasing demands both for energy and environment protection, economic cooperation (ECO) cars which have high fuel efficiency therefore are desirable. It is considered that the improvement of the fuel efficiency can be realized by reducing the vehicle’s weight. For a traditional metallic vehicle, however, it is difficult to realize both light weight and high crashworthiness. Therefore, people are considered use new materials system to instead of metal to manufacture next generation automobile. In the area, fiber reinforced composites (FRPs) are found to be attractive [1-28]. Research into the use of structural components such as bumper for energy management is not new. As a result, the energy absorbing characteristics of metals are fairly well understood. However, until the late 1970’s, attempts at understanding the energy absorbing capabilities