Experimental Investigation of Folding of Rubber-Filled Circular Tubes

In this paper, mechanical behaviors and energy absorption capacities of empty and rubber-filled brazen circular tubes under quasi-static axial loading have been investigated, experimentally. The specimens were cutout of commercially available brazen circular tubes with the same length and diameter. Some of the specimens were filled by rubbers with three different shores and also an empty tube was prepared. Load-displacement diagrams and energy absorption of specimens were extracted from experimental data. The results show that filling the brazen tubes with rubber causes those to absorb more energy and the amounts of energy absorption are increased by increasing the rubber shore. Also, the deformation of tubes filled with lower rubber shore is more asymmetrically, in contrast with the empty ones.

Keywords:

Axial compression , Quasi-static loading , Folding , Energy absorbers , Rubber-filled tubes