A review on crashworthiness studies of crash box structure

Many studies have focused on the topic of vehicle safety, including the study on crashworthiness. In vehicle, a crash box structure is an integral component for ensuring the safety of a car. It serves as an energy-absorbing member, together with the front bumper in case of frontal collision during car accidents. Therefore, special attention has to be given towards this structure in order to have better understanding regarding its mechanism of deformation and absorbing kinetic energy from the collision, as well as on how to obtain good crashworthy properties from this structure. This study, primarily, is based on extensive literature survey pertaining to the topic of crash box. As the topic of energy-absorbing member in a car is extensive, this review solely focuses on crash box structure. The main motivation of this paper is to summarise the different approaches and aspects of researches performed on car crash box structure to gain comprehensive knowledge regarding the study on crash box. •Researches on different approaches and aspect of crashworthiness study performed on crash box structure is reviewed.•A summary on the factors that affect the crashworthiness of crash box structure such as the design of the crash box structure itself, the selection of materials, and the loading conditions on the structure is given.•An overview on many types of configuration had been proposed in order to increase the crashworthiness performance of the structure is provided.•Research direction on the topic of crash box are discussed.