Numerical study on the energy absorption of foam-filled multi-layers Aluminum tubes under dynamic axial crushing

Numerical investigations are carried out to study the energy absorption behavior of multi-layers Aluminum tube without any fill, it is found that multi-layers Aluminum tube has more energy absorption and higher specific energy absorption (SEA) than that of the single layer tube. Based on these results, several types of foam-filled multi-layers tubes with different layers are designed and their crushing behaviors have been studied by numerical simulations. It shows that, the distortions of Aluminum foam are not only subjected to the axial crushing, but also to the interaction between layers in the radial direction. Then, three multi-layers Aluminum tubes filled by Aluminum foams with different densities have been modeled and parametric studies are conducted to determine the effect of the layer number and foam density on the energy absorption behavior. The results demonstrate that the energy absorption and the SEA of foam-filled multi-layers tube are increased with the increasing of layer number, but the SEA will begin to decrease when the foam density is increased to a certain value, while the SEA is still higher than that of single tube filled with the same foam.