Collapse behavior evaluation of hybrid thin-walled member by stacking condition

The recent trend of vehicle design aims at crash safety and environmentally-friendly aspect. For the crash safety aspect, the energy absorbing members should absorb collision energy sufficiently but for the environmentally-friendly aspect, the vehicle structure must be light weight in order to improve the fuel efficiency and reduce the tail gas emission. Therefore, the light weight of vehicle must be achieved in a securing safety status of crash. An aluminum or carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) is representative one of the light-weight materials. Based on the respective collapse behavior of aluminum and CFRP member, the collapse behavior of hybrid thin-walled member was evaluated. The hybrid members were manufactured by wrapping CFRP prepreg sheets outside the aluminum hollow members in the autoclave. Because the CFRP is an anisotropic material whose mechanical properties, such as strength and elasticity, change with its stacking condition, the effects of the stacking condition on the collapse behavior evaluation of the hybrid thin-walled member were tested. The collapse mode and energy absorption capability of the hybrid thin-walled member were analyzed with the change of the fiber orientation angle and interface number.

Experimental Evaluation of the Post-ultimate Strength Behavior of a Ship＇s Hull Girder in Waves

Experimental investigations into the collapse behavior of a box-shape hull girder subjected to extreme wave-induced loads are presented.The experiment was performed using a scaled model in a tank.In the middle of the scaled model,sacrificial specimens with circular pillar and trough shapes which respectively show different bending moment-displacement characteristics were mounted to compare the dynamic collapse characteristics of the hull girder in waves.The specimens were designed by using finite element(FE)-analysis.Prior to the tank tests,static four-point-bending tests were conducted to detect the load-carrying capacity of the hull girder.It was shown that the load-carrying capacity of a ship including reduction of the capacity after the ultimate strength can be reproduced experimentally by employing the trough type specimens.Tank tests using these specimens were performed under a focused wave in which the hull girder collapses under once and repetitive focused waves.It was shown from the multiple collapse tests that the increase rate of collapse becomes higher once the load-carrying capacity enters the reduction path while the increase rate is lower before reaching the ultimate strength.

Numerical characteristics of the full operator hybrid simulation method

The full operator method （FOM） has been proposed to overcome some of the shortcomings of the commonly used operator splitting method （OSM）. In particular, the FOM is improved by increasing the accuracy of both the predictor and corrector using the estimated tangent stiffness of the tested structure. The numerical characteristics of the FOM, including stability and accuracy, are investigated in this study. It is shown that FOM is conditionally stable. The stability and accuracy characteristics are dependent on the accuracy of the estimated tangent stiffness and the parameters associated with the acceleration variation in the time-stepping integration method. Mass-spring systems with different types of nonlinearity, including hardening, stiffening, and softening behavior, are used to evaluate the performance of the FOM. It is found that the FOM can capture these types of nonlinearity with satisfactory accuracy. Using a prototype 12-story composite coupled wall system, the influences of the strong nonlinearity of the system as well as the displacement control errors from hydraulic actuators on the performance of the FOM are explored. The results show that the FOM is capable of generating reasonably accurate results despite the presence of strong structural nonlinearity and displacement control errors.

CFD simulation of bubbling and collapsing characteristics in a gas-solid fluidized bed

Computational Fluid Dynamics （CFD） has become an alternative method to experiments for understanding the fluid dynamics of multiphase flow. A two-fluid model, which contains additional terms in both the gas- and solid-phase momentum equations, is used to investigate the fluidization quality in a fluidized bed. A case study for quartz sand with a density of 2,660 kg/m^3 and a diameter of 500 μm, whose physical property is similar to a new kind of catalyst for producing clean fuels through the residue fluid catalytic cracking process, is simulated in a two-dimensional fluidized bed with 0.57 m width and 1.00 m height. Transient bubbling and collapsing characteristics are numerically investigated in the platform of CFX 4.4 by integrating user-defined Fortran subroutines. The results show that the fluidization and collapse process is in fair agreement with the classical theory of Geldart B classification, but the collapse time is affected by bubbles at the interface between the dense phase and freeboard.