Quick Evaluation of Crashworthiness for Nonlinear Damped Systems by Using an Analytical Linearization Method

Abstract

The ability to predict crashworthiness is helpful for the cushion design. This is to minimize the impact loading on packaged products, such as drop impact loading occurring during shipment or transportation. In addition, the nonlinear characteristic of cushion system would affect the crashworthiness of the packaged goods. Therefore, an accurate analysis for the nonlinear cushion system is crucial in reliability design. However if nonlinear analysis is performed, a large computation load is required for numerical approaches; on the other hand, there is a need to include higher transcendent functions within the analytical approaches. In this paper, an analytical linearization method is applied to obtain quantitative solution in the nonlinear analysis. This method is not a numerical method, meanwhile, no high transcendent functions are considered. Therefore, the crashworthiness for nonlinear drop-impact systems can be quickly evaluated. In practical application, this method also shows good efficiency and good agreement with the experimental results.