Origami Pattern Tube for Vehicle Crash Box

Abstract: With an increasing number of traffic accidents, more and more people are injuring or even dying during the collision. One of the main reasons is frontal collisions. Therefore, the safety system is a very important part of the vehicle. In order to ensure the passengers’ safety, the common way to minimize mortality and property damage in a collision is to install energy absorption device in the vehicle structure called crash box. We propose to implement the principle of the origami pattern to improve the traditional bumper system, let the bumper have folding property. Origami properties make it useful to apply in a variety of engineering fields. The thin-walled tube and beam will undergo elastic deformation to decrease the impact force and absorb more kinetic energy. We use Autodesk Inventor 2012 to model the seamless origami pattern tube, and do the simulation by ABAQUS to analyze the displacement of axial compression and the impact force. The numerical results show that origami patterns perform well. Then we can obtain the plot with relationship between force and displacement in the elastic behavior and in the elastic-ideal plastic behavior. As for manufacturing field, we analyze existing manufacturing methods include stamping and tube hydroforming, compare them to find their features. Meanwhile we try to explore a new way to improve the accuracy and efficiency of manufacturing origami pattern tube.