Analytical and numerical investigations of metal square origami foam-filled tube under axial compression

It is widely known that thin-walled structures are expected for numerous engineering devices, due to lightweight, high specific strength, and excellent energy absorption capacity. Thus, the new high-efficiency energy absorbing (EA) device is the eternal pursuit goal of designers. A novel high-efficiency energy-absorbing device of the metal square origami foam-filled tube (MSOFT) under axial compression is designed in this article, and axial crushing of the MSOFT is investigated analytically and numerically. An analytical model for axial crushing of MSOFT is established based on the conservation of energy and the hyper-folded unit theory, considering the energy absorbed by the deformation of metal origami tube, foam compression, and the interaction between foam and origami tube. Then, the finite element (FE) simulation of MSOFTs under axial compression are conducted by Abaqus/Explicit software, and found that theoretical results are in good consistency with the FE results. Then, the influences of yield strength, wall thickness, height and cross-section width of the tube, and foam strength of MSOFT under axial compression are discussed, and found that the force and energy increases when the above parameters increase. Finally, the mean crushing force (MCF) and the crushing force efficiency (CFE) among MSOFT, origami tube and square tube are compared. Compare with the origami tube and square tube, the MCF of MSOFT increases by 40.8–106.9% and 12.1–49.8%, and the CFE of MSOFT increases by 101.2–266.3% and 1.1–12.4%. It is indicated that for a wide range of geometric and material parameters the MSOFT exhibits predictable and stable collapse behavior.