Development of a Mathematical Fracture Model of Carbon Fiber Energy-Absorbing Elements of a Vehicle Undercarriage

The use of composite materials is a promising way to reduce the weight of the undercarriage and of the entire vehicle, therefore the task of ensuring the passive safety of composite structures becomes important. To design and model the parts of the undercarriage responsible for passive safety, in particular the energy-absorbing zones, it is necessary to develop a mathematical model that takes into account specific characteristics of the destruction of the parts made of composite materials. In this paper, a computational and experimental method of designing composite structures providing passive safety and energy absorption is proposed. The existing approaches are reviewed and the choice of the design of the experimental specimen and the method of carrying out the experiment is justified. The developed mathematical model realized through the finite element analysis is verified by the results of dynamic tests of tubular specimens. The dependences of accelerations on time, obtained experimentally and by calculation, are compared. The adequacy of the results obtained and the feasibility of applying the proposed method for designing vehicle undercarriages are confirmed.

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