Collapse analysis of Al 6061 alloy conical shells with circular cutouts under axial loading: experiment and simulation

The current research is conducted to investigate the experimental and numerical study of crushing behavior and buckling modes of thin-walled truncated conical shells with or without cutouts and discontinuities under axial loading. In this regard, Instron 8802 servohydraulic machine is used to perform the experiments. Additionally, the buckling modes, derived from the axial collapse phenomenon, are simulated with Finite Element (FE) software. The force-displacement diagrams extracted numerically are compared with experimental results. Various factors, including maximum force, energy absorption, specific energy, and failure modes of each case, are also discussed. The results indicate that the increasing cutout cause a decrease in the maximum force and energy absorption. Moreover, with cutouts reduction, the failure modes of the samples changed from the diamond asymmetric mode and single-lobe mode to multi-lobes, and with removing cutouts, the failure mode is observed to be completely symmetric.