Crashworthiness of Inflatable Thin-Walled Structures for Impact Absorption

Abstract

The paper describes application of innovative, inflatable thin-walled structures for absorption of the impact loading and thoroughly investigates their crash characteristics. The proposed concept assumes inflation of thin-walled structures with compressed gas of appropriately adjusted pressure in order to improve their basic mechanical properties, enhance energy dissipation capabilities, and increase corresponding durability to impact loading. In the first part of the paper the influence of compressed gas on mechanical characteristics of aluminium beverage can is analysed experimentally and by the corresponding numerical simulations. The following section proposes and numerically verifies three diverse engineering applications of inflatable thin-walled structures for impact absorption. Finally, the last part introduces the concept of adaptive inflatable barrier and briefly presents three simple strategies of pressure control. Both the performed basic experiment and the conducted numerical simulations show the advantageous influence of compressed gas and prove the feasibility of using inflatable thin-walled structures for impact absorption.