The crashworthiness of helicopter fuel tank is vital to the survivability of the passengers and structures. In order to understand and improve the crashworthiness of the soft fuel tank of helicopter during the crash, this paper investigated the dynamic behavior of the nylon woven fabric composite fuel tank striking on the ground. A fluid-structure interaction finite element model of the fuel ta...

The use of cellular materials in general in the automotive industry, and polymeric foams in particular, has been increasing significantly for the last few decades. These materials are used within a particular vehicle for many different purposes, among which are, for example, sound and thermal insulation, vibration damping, fire protection and, of course, crashworthiness. Thus, crashworthiness, ...

As a form of transport, rail has always maintained lower accident levels than its counterparts, the car and the airplane. The railway industry, however strives for still better safety measures to be implemented – a fact which intensifies with each accident that occurs. In the last years the continuous developments in technology, computer modeling capabilities and know-how have opened up various...

Cylindrical thin-walled tubes due to construction and easy installation, high energy absorption capacity are used in the automotive industry as an impact energy absorber. However, the main weakness of cylindrical tubes is in the high initial peak load. Therefore, in this paper, to overcome this weakness, a buckling initiator is used at the top of the tube. This buckling initiator is a steel rod...

Meta-models are frequently used to offset high computational cost of crashworthiness optimization problems. Radial basis function based meta-models are gaining popularity among various meta-modeling techniques due to their ability to approximate non-linear responses with relatively low fitting cost. However, the performance of RBF networks is very sensitive to the choice of topology. In this pa...

The performance of radial basis function networks largely depends on the choice of topology i.e., location and number of centers, radius of influence. Thus finding the best network is a multi-level optimization problem. It is obvious that different criteria for optimization would result in different network topologies. A systematic study is carried out to compare the most widely used root mean ...