Numerical investigations about the use of lattice structures in energy absorbing systems

Conventional crash structures normally use areal folding mechanisms to absorb energy. In this work, we show an alternative design concept by using three dimensional lattice structures. The study shows that the cell parameters of bending and tension dominated unit cells have great influences on the specific energy absorption. For bending dominated cells face‐centred cubic cells with vertical struts (f2ccz) and for tensions dominated cells, 3D re‐entrant auxetic structures are used. To investigate the influences of the cell parameters on the energy absorption a numerical parametric study is done.