Crashworthiness of automobile made of HDPE/kenaf and HDPE/MWCNT polymer composites

Abstract

Abstract The present work deals with the crashworthiness of high-density polyethylene/kenaf and high-density polyethylene/multi-walled carbon nanotube polymer composites. The purpose of using polymer composites for the crashworthiness is their high specific energy absorption due to the low weight of the polymer composites. The various mechanical properties (Young’s modulus, tensile yield strength, and ultimate tensile strength) of the stated polymer composites have been predicted by a uniaxial tensile test. Further, these properties have been used as the input for the crash simulation. A widely known finite element method (FEM) package ANSYS has been used for the crashworthiness of the automobile. In the present study, HDPE/kenaf and HDPE/MWCNT polymer composites with 20 wt. % of reinforcement have been considered. The CAD geometry of automobile structure is modelled in SolidWorks and further analyze in ANSYS-explicit dynamics. Numerical results are presented in the form of equivalent (von Mises) stress and directional deformation of the automobile’s body panel with respect to time. It has been observed that the body panel made of HDPE/kenaf polymer composite induces relatively higher magnitude of equivalent (von Mises) stress and lower directional deformation by 42.85 %.