Recently together with structural efficiency, passenger safety is also an important issue in application of material to transportation industries. Hence, the crashworthiness parameters are introducing to predict the capability of structure to prevent the massive damage and protect the passenger in the event of a crash. Crashworthiness parameters for various thin-walled tubes made from metal or fibre/resin composites in different geometries have been studied. A critical difference of tubular composites failure modes compared with metallic is the brittle collapse. In addition, in composites, tubular failure modes are involved with micro-cracking development, delamination, fibre breakage, etc., instead of plastic deformation. Implementation of composite materials in the field of crashworthiness is attributed to Hull, who in 80s and 90s of the last century studied extensively the crushing behaviour of fibre reinforced composite material. He found that the composite materials absorbed high energy in the face of the fracture surface energy mechanism rather than plastic deformation as observed for metals [1]. This observation has inspired others to further investigation about crashworthiness characteristics of composite materials. Studies have examined the axial crushing behaviour of fibre-reinforced tubes [2], fibreglass tubes [3,4], PVC tubes [5] and carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) tubes [6].
