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The design of aluminum foam reinforced thin-walled tubes has garnered much interest recently due to the high energy absorption capacity of these tubes. As a new kind of engineering composite material, aluminum foam can hugely increase the crashworthiness capacity without sacrificing too much weight. In this paper, axisymmetric thin-walled hollow tubes with four different kinds of cross-sections (circular, square, hexagonal and octagonal) are studied to assess their performance for crashworthiness problems. It is found that the tube with square cross-section has the best crashworthiness performance under axial impact. To seek optimal designs of square aluminum foam reinforced thin-walled tubes, a surrogate modeling technique coupled with a multi-criteria particle swarm optimization algorithm has been developed, to maximize specific energy absorption (SEA) and minimize peak crash force (PCF).

To find out the main excitation sources of a bus floor's vibration, modal analysis and spectral analysis were respectively performed in the paper. First we tested the vibration modal of the bus's floor under the full-load condition, and the first ten natural frequencies and vibration modes were obtained for the source identification of the bus floor's vibration. Second the vibration characteristic of the bus floor was measured in an on-road experiment. The acceleration sensors were arranged on the bus's floor and the possible excitation sources of the bus, which includes engine mounting system, driveline system, exhaust system, and wheels. Then the on-road experiment was carefully conducted on a highway under the four kinds of test condition: in-situ acceleration, uniform velocity (90km/h, 100km/h, 110km/h, 120km/h), uniform acceleration with top gear, and stall sliding condition with neutral gear.