Energy absorption and deformation of cellular structures with dovetail joints

In this paper, the dovetail joint is creatively applied to cellular structural plates. Based on the concave cellular structural dovetail joint plates, several new cellular structural dovetail joints with stable quality are designed by chamfering the joints and bending the rods. Tensile experiments of several dovetail jointed cellular structure plates are carried out to investigate the effects of the connection methods on energy absorption and deformation behavior. Finite element models are established and the finite element simulation results are compared with the experimental results for verification. By comparing the different dovetail connection methods, the results show that under axial tensile conditions, the dovetail-jointed cellular structures generally fail at the rod connections. The chamfering of the rod connection and the bending of the rod at the connection can significantly improve the model load-carrying capacity, and when the chamfering or the degree of rod bending is large, the energyabsorbing characteristics of the model can be significantly improved due to the increased stress and deformation of the model's horizontal rods.