Numerical analysis of automotive bumper crash box to enhance energy absorption.

A finite element analysis on crash box of an automotive bumper system is presented in the paper to investigate the energy absorption of the component with and without foam-filled steel sheet metal tubes of different thicknesses for crashing or low-velocity impact analysis. The energy absorption capacity of the crash box for crashing is evaluated for different design changes of the foams-tube structure and compared the results without foam. By changing the different foam materials, various designs are proposed and simulated for maximum energy absorption. Altair Hyperworks is used for preprocessing and post-processing and Radios solver is used to run the analysis. A reasonable agreement is obtained in the results of the analytical and numerical methods. The results indicate that the energy absorption of a foam-filled crash box structure is superior to the crash box without foam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]