Abstract: Carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) composite materials demonstrate significant promise to further improve weight to performance in automotive engineering. Nevertheless, parameters setting and modeling of CFRP component remains rather challenging in finite element method. In this prospective, this paper aims to promote the computational precision and efficiency of axial crushing CFRP tubes by establishing effective constitutive model that is implemented in commercial finite element package LS-DYNA. Three methods, including material parameters turning, modeling modification with different shell layers and different triggers were presented. First, experimental investigations have been conducted in order to obtain reliable MAT54 material parameters, and then the parameters without physical meanings was turned into reasonable range to improve correlation with experiments. Second, four numerical models with different shell layers were developed to simulate experimental crushing tests on the square CFRP tubes. Finally, the effect of triggers with different configuration for single shell layer model and double shell layers model were analyzed. The comparisons of numerical results with experimental data indicated that the double shell layers model with 45° trigger is capable of reproducing experimental results with relatively higher accuracy, which yielded up to only 2.55% error in terms of energy absorption. The simulation models and modeling methods in this paper are of guiding significance for analyzing CFRP tubes in LS-DYNA.

Key words: CFRP tubes, material parameters, shell layers, triggers