Crash Energy-Absorption Structure Design Based on an Innovated Leightweight Technology

Since lightweight in vehicle design can largely reduce the energy consume and gas emission along with a comprehensive property promotion, experts have denoted great efforts on developing new lightweight technologies. Nevertheless, the ever-existed researches indicate that the lightweight is always started from a macro-view by material replacement or structure optimization. To extend the lightweight study to a micro-view, an innovated lightweight technology based on the negative Poisson’s ratio structure and space truss composite material is introduced herein to redesign a crash box and bumper assembly under the crashworthiness targets. Besides, systematic analysis of its crashworthiness property is carried out. The results show that the potential capability of this new technology in crashworthiness-based structure lightweight design is enormous.