A probabilistic study into the influences of fiber angle orientations on energy absorption performance of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer composite tubes

The influence of fiber orientations on the crashworthiness of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) composite tubes was investigated to fill in the knowledge gap regarding the effects of fiber angle on the energy-absorbing potential of these tubes. This study adopted the Hammersley sequence sampling (HSS) method to generate a quasi-random distribution of the design objectives. Then, LS-DYNA was utilized for numerical quasi-static crushing tests to measure the specific energy absorption (SEA) and the crushing force efficiency (CFE) of a quasi-static CFRP tube at different fiber angles. The Kriging method was implemented to generate a surrogate model. Finally, Pareto results were extracted deterministically and probabilistically using the NSGAII algorithm. Fiber orientation angles are naturally exposed to uncertainties in the manufacturing process; thus, the main contribution of the study is illustrating the effects of fiber angle orientations on the energy-absorbing characteristics of CFRP tubes while incorporating uncertainties into the optimization procedure. Interestingly, the optimum fiber angle orientations revealed the potential advantage of using non-conventional angle-ply layouts by improving the CFE by up to 4% compared with the initial design configuration. The results also demonstrated the capability and superior performance of the optimization procedure in finding the global optima, and the necessity of conducting a probabilistic examination in similar studies.