Investigation on Microstructure of Beetle Elytra and Energy Absorption Properties of Bio-Inspired Honeycomb Thin-Walled Structure under Axial Dynamic Crushing

The beetle elytra requires not only to be lightweight to make a beetle fly easily, but also to protect its body and hind-wing from outside damage. The honeycomb sandwich structure in the beetle elytra make it meet the above requirements. In the present work, the microstructures of beetle elytra, including biology layers and thin-walled honeycombs, are observed by scanning electron microscope and discussed. A new bionic honeycomb structure (BHS) with a different hierarchy order of filling cellular structure is established. inspired by elytra internal structure. Then the energy absorbed ability of different bionic models with the different filling cell size are compared by using nonlinear finite element software LS-DYNA (Livermore Software Technology Corp., Livermore, CA, USA). Numerical results show that the absorbed energy of bionic honeycomb structures is increased obviously with the increase of the filling cell size. The findings indicate that the bionic honeycomb structure with second order has an obviously improvement over conventional structures filled with honeycombs and shows great potential for novel clean energy absorption equipment.