Materials Today: Proceedings 26 (2020) 2113–2115

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Materials Today: Proceedings

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A numerical analysis of the effect of variation of groove on thin-walled

tube under quasi-static load
Sangharsh Kumar Singh ⇑, Ashutosh Upadhyay, Ramesh Pandey
MNNIT Allahabad, Prayagraj 211004, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Crashworthiness characteristics of structures which may undergo impact loading is one of the most crit-
Received 31 December 2019 ical parameters and are important to evaluate in order to ensure minimum structural damage. The pre-
Accepted 13 February 2020 sent work is focused on to analyze crash-worthiness characteristics of thin-walled tubes numerically
Available online 10 March 2020
through ABAQUS 6.5. The tubes were incorporated with different number of semi-circular grooves on
their outer walls. In the computational analysis, the number of grooves is varied as 4, 6 and 8 and its
Keywords: effects on the crashworthiness parameters have been evaluated. Load-displacement curves for different
Thin-walled tube
cases have been plotted and parameters such as peak load and energy absorption are calculated and com-
Crash-worthiness characteristics
Numerical simulation
pared with that of a simple thin wall tube. A detailed analysis of the fold formation mechanism for all the
Peak load tubes has been carried out. It is clearly seen that the crashworthiness characteristics of grooved tubes are
Quasi-static analysis much better than that of the simple tube.
Ó 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 10th International Con-
ference of Materials Processing and Characterization.

1. Introduction
After the industrial revolution, the world is swarming with
motorized vehicles for transportation day and night. In this fast-
moving era, the safety of passengers occupying the vehicles is at
a large stake due to the accidental vulnerabilities. The safety con-
cerns in these moving structures have been widely studied over
the years. The major objective of structural engineers and design-
ers is to convert the impact energy of collision into plastic defor-
mation effectively in order to ensure the safety and minimum
structural damage. Regarding this, researchers have been coming
up with many promising solutions for many years; the use of a
thin-walled tube is one such solution.
Thin-walled tubes have distinct advantages like great energy-
absorbing capacity, lightweight, lower cost, and easy installability.
These structures have an excellent capability of converting impact
energy into plastic deformation in a controlled manner.
In the solution of the collapse behavior of the tube, Alexander
[1] did a theoretical analysis to find out the collapse load for axial
compression of the tube and compare the theoretical result with
experimental results. Abramowicz and Wierzbicki [2] did the anal-
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: sangharsh@mnnit.ac.in (S. Kumar Singh).
ysis of the crushing mechanism of the tube theoretically and given
a theory for the traveling mechanism of hinge formation in the
square tube. Abramowicz and Jones [3] did numerous experimen-
tal tests on the circular and square tube statically as well as
dynamically to find out the progressive buckling behavior and
effect of strain rate. An experimental analysis of a grooved tube
was done by Daneshi and Hosseinipour [4] and find out the effect
of groove distance on the crashworthiness parameters. Qiao et al.
[5] have performed an experimental and numerical analysis
for the square aluminum extruded tube. In the analysis, he varied
the impact velocity and thickness of the tube and also consider the
damage criteria. Zhang and Huh [6] used the LS-DYNA code for
finding the effect of longitudinal grooves on the tube. The stamping
method is used for the fabrication of grooves, the effect of groove
width and length is also investigated. Salehghaffari et al. [7] did
an experimental analysis on the aluminum tube incorporated with
a press-fitted steel ring. A theoretical analysis of a circular tube
with foam-filled was done by Niknejad et al. [8]. In his work, he
finds the mean crushing force of the foam-filled tube and compares
it with the experiment results. Tarlochan et al. [9] CAD process is
used to analyze the different cross-section of tubes subjected to
axial and oblique loading. A trigger mechanism was also used to
see the effect on crashworthiness characteristics.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.02.456
2214-7853/Ó 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 10th International Conference of Materials Processing and Characterization.
2114 S. Kumar Singh et al. / Materials Today: Proceedings 26 (2020) 2113–2115

A comprehensive numerical analysis is carried out in the pre-
sent work for deriving the crashworthiness characteristics of a thin
wall tube by varying the number of grooves. For the analysis, 4, 6
and 8 number of grooves are considered and the simulation is
run using ABAQUS 6.5. The obtained parameters from the load-
displacement curves are compared with that obtained from a sim-
ple tube.
2. Geometrical attributes and methodology
For the numerical analysis, the computational domain consist-
ing of a thin tube (of dimensions; mean diameter D = 60 mm, wall
thickness t = 2 mm and length L = 120 mm) is modeled on ABAQUS.
Table 1 shows the dimensions of the specimen. Different numbers
of grooves of the semi-circular cross-section are cut at the outer
wall of the tubes. Fig. 1 shows the geometry of a thin wall tube
with and without grooves. The solid element for analysis of the
modeled tube is taken C3D8R type. An upper rigid plate, which is
placed at the top of the tube is allowed to move only in the vertical
direction with a constant velocity, and lower rigid plate, placed to
the bottom of the tube is the constraint in all directions.
3. Crashworthiness parameters
Crashworthiness parameters are used to analysis of the crash-
worthiness characteristics of the structure, some parameters with
a brief description is as following:
3.1. Initial peak crushing force
load-displacement curve. The highest energy absorption value is
the indication of an excellent crashworthy structure.
4. Results and discussion
The load vs displacement graph of simple and varying groove
tube, obtained from numerical simulation are compared in Fig. 4.
It is clearly seen that the simple tube has the maximum peak load
and it decreases significantly as the no of the groove increases. C8-
grooves tube shows the minimum peak load which is 33% less than
the simple tube. From the load-displacement curve, energy absorp-
tion of all the tube is calculated and summarized in Table 2. Results
show that the groove tube has the highest energy absorption value
as compared to the non –grooved tube and value increase as the no
of grove increases respectively. Among these, C8- groove tube has
the highest energy absorption value and it is 25% more than the
non-grooved tube. Initially, as the load on the tube increases, elas-
tic deformation takes place upto a certain value of the load. After
the peak load, plastic deformation of the tube in the form of fold
formation takes place and load keeps on decreasing up to a certain
minimum. Now, from this stable minimum load, it again starts
increasing due to strain hardening effect and after reaching a cer-
tain value, second fold formation starts along with decreasing load.
The whole mechanism of fold formation of a simple tube and C8
groove tube can be seen in Figs. 2 and 3.
It is found that peak load decreases and energy absorption
increases as the number of grooves increases which explains the
enhanced crashworthiness characteristics of the tube. As the no.
of grooves increases, uniformity of the load-displacement curve

Initial peak crushing force also called peak force is the maxi-
mum crushing force to formation of the first fold of the tube. For
better crashworthiness of structure, it should be lower and close Table 2
Result of numerical simulation.
to the mean crushing force.
Tube Name Peak Load(kN) Energy Absorption(kJ)

3.2. Energy absorption Simple Tube 120 6.5

C4-groove Tube 105 6.9
C6-groove Tube 98 7.4
It is the ability of the energy absorbed by the structure
C-8 groove Tube 90 8.1
during crushing. It is calculated as total area under the

Table 1
Specimen dimensions.

Specimen Mean dia(mm) Tube Length (mm) Wall thickness (mm) Width of groove (mm) Depth of grooves (mm) No of Grooves
Simple 60 120 2 – – –
C4-groove 60 120 2 2 1 4
C6-groove 60 120 2 2 1 6
C8groove 60 120 2 2 1 8

Fig. 1. Simple tube (a) and tube with grooves (b) 4, (c) 6 and (d) 8.
 S. Kumar Singh et al. / Materials Today: Proceedings 26 (2020) 2113–2115 2115

Fig. 2. Fold formation mechanism in simple thin-walled tube.

Fig. 3. Fold formation mechanism in grooved tube.

case, C8- groove is found with the best crashworthiness

characteristics.

6. Credit author statement

All authors have equal contribution for this article.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-

cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.

Fig. 4. Load-displacement curves for different thin wall tubes.
improves which is again an indication of improved crashworthi-
ness characteristics.
5. Conclusions
Based on the computational analyses, it is seen that the plastic
hinge starts forming at the grooves and thus with the more no. of
grooves, more folds are formed. Therefore, cutting grooves on the
thin wall tubes contributes to improving crashworthiness charac-
teristics as the peak load decreases and energy absorption
increases with increasing the number of grooves. Moreover, due
to the more uniform load–displacement curve, the safety of pas-
sengers is also assured with less jerk at the time of collision. Thus,
it is concluded that crashworthiness characteristics of a thin wall
tube can be improved with incorporating the grooves at its outer
wall and it gets even better with more number of grooves; in our
References
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