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There has been a keen interest in recent times on implementation of lightweight materials in vehicles to bring down the unladen weight of a vehicle for enhancing fuel efficiency. Fiber-reinforced composites comprise a class of such materials. As sustainability is also a preoccupation of current product development engineers including vehicle designers, bio-composites based on natural fibers are receiving a special attention. Keeping these motivations of lower effective density, environment friendliness and occupational safety in mind, woven jute fabric based composites have been recently studied as potential alternatives to glass fiber composites for structural applications in automobiles. In the past, mechanical characterization of jute-polyester composites were restricted to obtaining their stress-strain behaviors under quasi-static conditions.

This paper focuses on the energy absorbing characteristics and progressive deformation behavior of woven jute-polyester composite cylindrical tubes subjected to an axial impact load. In this study, the impact energy absorption characteristics and crushing mechanisms of composite tubes of different thicknesses and number of plies are investigated. To start with, coupon specimens are made from laminates of jute and glass fiber-based polyester composites. These are then tested in a UTM for mechanical characterization of the composites under tensile and compressive loading conditions. Experiments are then conducted in a drop-weight impact testing device to investigate crash performance characteristics such as mean crush load, absorbed energy and specific energy absorption (SEA) of woven jute-polyester composite cylindrical tubes.

In the present study, the behavior of hemispherical glass fiber-reinforced plastic (GFRP) energy-absorbers under applied transverse load has been investigated experimentally and numerically. A thermosetting general purpose polyester resin, along with bi-directionally woven E-glass fiber mats, has been used for the fabrication of the test specimens. Previously a limited number of studies were reported for hemispherical features made of composite laminates with fabrics based on randomly oriented chopped glass fibers. A motivation behind the current study is that woven fabric mats with continuous bi-directional strands can be considered as more reliable in terms of consistency of properties when compared with chopped strand mats. Additionally, the current concept of dome-shaped composite entities has been explored for vehicle safety applications, which has not been done earlier.