Lightweight Energy Absorbers for Electric Vehicles: Review and perspectives

This review explores vehicle crash box technologies, with particular consideration of their application in electric vehicles (EVs), classified into metallic, composite, and bio-inspired designs. Metallic absorbers, such as steel and aluminum thin-walled crash boxes, and multi-cell structures are cost-effective, manufacturable, and predictably deformable, but their high density increases vehicle mass, reducing efficiency in electric and hybrid vehicles (EVs and HEVs) can be counted as their downsides. Composite absorbers, including CFRP, GFRP, and foam-filled structures, provide significantly higher specific energy absorption (SEA) and weight reduction, making them suitable for lightweight designs, though challenges remain in manufacturing complexity, cost and recyclability. Hybrid and bio-inspired crash boxes integrate complex geometries and multi-material systems to maximize energy absorption. Bio-inspired designs are further categorized as plant, animal, and microstructure-inspired. Plant-inspired structures, modeled after bamboo, lotus root, and honeycomb, achieve SEA gains exceeding ۹۰% via hierarchical and multi-cell arrangements. Animal-inspired designs, such as ladybeetle, shell-derived geometries and sea sponge lattices, improve buckling control and maintain stable plateau stresses. Microstructure-inspired designs, including fractal branching and auxetic geometries, offer tunable deformation and multi-plateau stress-strain responses. Advances in additive manufacturing (AM), numerical optimization, and material engineering enable these designs to deliver high energy absorption while minimizing weight, highlighting their potential for protecting battery packs in EVs and HEVs.

کلیدواژه ها:

Energy Absorption ، Crash Box ، Electric Vehicle ، Battery Pack ، Additive Manufacturing