Numerical simulation of FDM thin-walled tubes under axial crushing considering global interlayer delamination

Thin-walled structures fabricated by fused deposition modeling (FDM) have attracted increasing attention in crashworthiness applications. However, most existing numerical studies on FDM thin-walled energy absorbers simplify the material response as isotropic elastic-plastic and neglect interlayer delamination. The quantitative errors induced by this simplification remain unclear. In this work, a modeling methodology is proposed for predicting the crushing behavior of FDM thin-walled structures, accounting for global interlayer delamination. Numerical simulations of the axial crushing behavior of an FDM square tube were performed using both the proposed modeling methodology and a simplified model without interlayer delamination. Compared with the experimental results, the simulation using the proposed methodology predicted the mean crushing force with an error of only 4.35 %, whereas neglecting interlayer delamination increased the prediction error by a factor of 8.66, up to 37.68 %. The main contribution of this study is to quantify the significant influence of interlayer delamination on the prediction accuracy of FDM thin-walled structures’ crushing behaviors. Furthermore, the proposed modeling methodology holds enormous potential for predicting the performance of a broad range of FDM thin-walled energy absorbers with diverse geometries and material systems.