Response Behavior of Aluminum Alloy/CFRP Hybrid Beams under Impact Bending Load

Abstract

Carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) laminates are used in various industrial fields because they have excellent properties of the specific strength and specific stiffness. The CFRP has a potential of weight reduction in the automotive structure which can contribute to the improvement of mileage as well as the reduction of carbon dioxide. On the other hand, the safety issue in case of collision should be also clarified for employing the CFRP as automotive structures. In this paper, Al alloy beams reinforced with the CFRP were examined by both experiments and numerical analysis as candidates to replace the conventional steel door guarder beam used inside the automotive door. The experimental relations of impact loading to the deformation of the Al alloy beams with different thicknesses, widths and types of CFRP showed a good agreement with those of numerical results. These results show that the numerical method developed here is useful for estimating the impact behavior of Al guarder beams with CFRP layers.