Crashworthiness design optimisation of metal honeycomb energy absorber used in lunar lander

To provide a theoretical basis for metal honeycombs being used as buffering and crashworthy structures in a lunar lander system, this paper investigates the energy absorption properties of hexagonal metal honeycombs, and the size optimisation of the metal honeycomb energy absorber is performed by using response surface method (RSM). Specific energy absorption (SEA) is set as the design objective; the cell length and foil thickness of the metal honeycombs are optimised, while the applied mean crash load is set to not exceed allowable limits. The results demonstrate that this method is effective in solving crashworthiness design optimisation problems. Besides the design optimisation, parametric studies are carried out to investigate the influences of foil thickness and cell length on the metal honeycombs' crash performances. The pre-processing software Patran is used to build up the finite element models and the explicit solver LS-DYNA is employed to perform the crashworthiness analyses.