Correlation-based analysis on thin walled tubes

Sammanfattning: In the transportation sector, crash structures are often used to protect their inhabitants inthe event of a collision. These crash structures frequently utilize thin-walled tubes as energyabsorbers. The process of developing thin-walled tubes is iterative based and requires mul-tiple simulations, making it resource intensive. This thesis researches how thin-walled tubesare developed today, what kind of challenges exist in the development process and whattools and methods are used to shorten the development lead times. Later a new methodfor assessing TWBs crashworthiness before a simulation is investigated. In this method43 cross-section geometries from thin-walled tubes used in automobiles are parameterized.These tubes are later subjected to a dynamic crash simulation along their longitudinal axis.Results from these simulations are correlated to their respective parameters in order to findmeaningful relation between the parameters and results. It was found that the circumferenceof a cross-section correlates with its crashworthiness. With this finding, the developmentlead times of thin-walled tubes could be shortened by reducing the amount of required FEMsimulations.