Shock Resistance Properties of Porous Buffer Made of Metal Rubber for Landing Equipment

The lander detection device uses the outrigger buffer structure due to its complex impact loading during the landing process. This external load can be absorbed by using a lander buffer mechanism consisting of porous Metal Rubber (MR) buffer and a backup buffering structure. Therefore, in order to fully use the dry friction damping characteristics of MR material behaved under special working conditions, a buffering system has been designed to examine the important factors involved in shock energy absorption. In this study, the hybrid buffering system with MR buffer as core component and an aluminum honeycomb as auxiliary structure for the consideration of safety and reliability was modeled. Moreover, the finite element method by combining the COMBI165 spring damping unit and solid contact elements were used in ANSYS LS-DYNA to simulate the shock resistance of buffer component. The effect of influencing factors on mechanical properties of MR, as well as the feature importance of nonlinear stiffness of MR buffer, were calculated with consideration of ambient temperature, peak value and pulse width of external excitation and relative density on the shock resistance of MR. According to the orthogonal comparison between the above three parameters and temperature, the impact resistance and temperature adaptability of MR were comprehensively analyzed. The final results demonstrated that MR material had major potential for absorbing the impact energy used as a buffer in landing equipment, which would provide constructive guidance for the design of hybrid buffering system and development of MR material in the future.