Deployment of a Neo-Hookean membrane: experimental and numerical analysis

Abstract

The aim of this research is to assess the response of a thin membrane subjected to high-pressure gas loading for inflation. This procedure is applied during the design process of the membrane structure to allow the product to resist high-pressure loading and to further characterize the hyper-elastic material. The simulation in this work considers the standard procedures used in the LS-DYNA software, which applies such assumptions as a uniform airbag pressure and temperature in addition to a more recently developed procedure that takes into account the fluid-structure interaction between the inflation gas source and the hyper-elastic membrane; this approach is referred to as the Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) formulation. Until recently, to simulate the inflation of the hyperelastic membrane, a uniform pressure based on a thermodynamic model or experimental test has been applied to the structure as the boundary conditions. To conserve CPU time, this work combines both methods; the fluid structure coupling method is used at an earlier stage in which the fluid is modeled using full hydrodynamic equations, and at the later stage, the uniform pressure procedure is applied, and the fluid mesh and analysis are removed from the computation. Both simulations were compared to test data, indicating satisfactory correlation with the more recently developed procedure, the ALE theory, which showed the greatest accuracy both in terms of graphical and schematic comparison, particularly in the early stages of the inflation process. As a result, the new simulation procedure model can be applied to research on the effects of design changes in the new membrane.