Mechanical design and energy absorption analysis of spherical honeycomb core for soft-landing device buffer shell

Soft-landing buffer systems with spherical curvature outer shells are widely used in the aerospace field, which not only requires its efficient and smooth buffer performance, but also that the shell of the landing buffer system is compact and lightweight. This paper presents a novel design method for the spherical honeycomb core structure for a soft-landing device buffer shell. The proposed method aims to realize the positive sphere characteristics of the honeycomb core by adopting the spherical mosaic of a truncated icosahedron and the triangle formation principle. Furthermore, according to the relationship of the deformation and the energy absorption performance, the optimum structural parameters are obtained by discussing the mechanical properties of the inner core, which determine the unit size and density of the whole model. At the same time, we estimate the distortion rate caused by projection that can be considered as an evaluation criterion to describe the performance of the proposed structure of the spherical honeycomb core. Simulation tests are carried out employing Abaqus/explicit to analyze the distortion impact and the energy-absorbtion properties of the proposed structures under different actual environments.