Study of the effect of varying shapes of holes in energy absorption characteristics on aluminium circular windowed tubes under quasi-static loading

In this paper, energy absorption characteristics of circular windowed tubes with different section shapes (circular, ellipse, square, hexagon, polygon and pentagon) are investigated numerically and experimentally. The tube possesses the same material, thickness, height, volume and average cross sectional area which are subjected under axial and oblique quasi-static loading conditions. Numerical model was constructed with FE code ABAQUS/Explicit, the obtained outcome of simulation is in good matching with the experimental data. The energy absorbed, specific energy absorption, crash force efficiency, peak and mean loads along with the collapse modes with their initiation point of simple and windowed tubes were evaluated. The technique for order of preference by similarity ideal solution (TOPSIS) approach was employed for assessing their overall crushing performances. The obtained results confirm that efficacy of crash force indicators have improved by introducing windows and tubes with pentagonal and circular windows achieves the maximum ranking about 0.528 and 0.517, it clearly reveals the above are best window shapes.