Progressive Failure of Composite Hollow Sections with Foam-Filled Corrugated Sandwich Walls

The aim of this paper was to model the progressive failure of foam-filled twin-walled composite hollow box sections with internal reinforcement. The effect of different corner designs, and different arrangements of the corrugation inside the core were investigated. The numerical model developed to simulate quasi-static compression tests involved integrating a progressive failure criterion into an explicit dynamic analysis code. The model provided very good correlation with experimental crush force data and effectively described the progressive material failure. It also enabled the energy absorption contribution of each of the main structural components to be determined. It was concluded that this particular approach had the potential to be used in the design and optimisation of crashworthy composite structures containing similar features to those involved here.