Study of Thin-Walled Box Beams Crushing Behavior Using LS-DYNA

This paper investigates the dynamic crushing behaviors of steel beams with box cross sections. Systematic parametric studies were conducted in order to reveal the effect of material properties, including strain hardening ratio and strain rate effect, length of the beam, and initial impact velocity on the crushing behaviors of the steel beams. A number of finite element models were constructed with various sets of parameters and used for crashworthiness analyses. Maximum crushing force, mean force, and specific energy absorption (SEA) were recorded after analyses and compared to reflect the influences of parameters. An explicit finite element solver, LS-DYNA®, was used in this study for modeling and analyses.