Abstract
In order to design the appropriate crashworthy structure of locomotive vehicle, the two-layer thin-walled structures were taken as research objects. The efficient non-linear explicit dynamic finite element analysis software, ANSYS/LS-DYNA, was adopted to research energy absorption characteristics of the one-layer thin-walled structure and the two-layer thin-walled structure. The results have shown that the evaluation parameters (the energy-absorbing efficiency, the buffer index) of energy absorption characteristics of two-layer thin-walled structures are better than those of one-layer structures. An idea of using two-layer thin-walled structure as energy-absorbing element of crashworthy vehicle is put forward. The results of simulation on two-layer thin-walled structures with different shapes and lengths have also shown that the inner-layer length has effect on energy absorption characteristics.
