Design of a Crease Pattern for Pre-Folded Origami Structures to Improve Vehicle Crashworthiness

To promote the progressive collapse of thin-walled vehicle structures and improve their energy-absorbing capabilities, designers allocate collapse initiators such as holes, grooves, humps, and creases. The use of some traditional origami patterns in pre-folded tubes has been particularly effective in this task. However, selecting the optimal origami pattern is a complex multidimensional combinatorial problem. This paper introduces a new origami pattern that triggers an extensional progressive collapse mode in a wide range of thin-walled tubes with a square cross-section. The parameters of the proposed pattern are optimized using a multi-objective Bayesian optimization algorithm to minimize the peak crushing force and maximize the mean crushing force. The crash simulations are supported by the commercial finite element solver Radioss. The optimized pre-folded origami structure depicts extensional progressive collapse under axial loads. Compared to alternative designs, results demonstrate significant improvement in crashworthiness indicators.