Design Optimization Of A Side Curtain Airbag

As vehicles have improved in how they protect occupants in frontal crashes, the relative importance of protecting people in side-impact crashes has increased. Among the injured or killed, side impact play a critical role in vehicle crashes. Also, both the data statistical and the simulations demonstrate that the head of occupant was the most likely fatal injured site of a human body in the side impact. For this reason, the side curtain airbag is the greatest possible part of the vehicle interior for protecting the head of occupant. Nonetheless, as the number of cars equipped with side curtain airbag increases, more data is becoming available and more reports of injuries caused by airbag deployment are appearing in the literature. As such, it is important to assess and optimum design the mechanisms of injury associated with side curtain airbag deployment and parameters.As a consequence, a number of studies during the past several years were carried out to evaluate occupant safety and reduce the potential for injury during crashes, and also as an efficient method the development of a dummy finite element (FE) Model were used to investigate the mechanisms of occupant injury and factors affecting injury potential.Data through2009by different country show that a side car crash plays very critical roles and occupies a very high proportion of the entire traffic accident road traffic accident. In China, the2005annual reports:frontal impact accounted for26.43%, side impact accounted for39.50%, due to a side collision caused casualties accounted for37.36%, also higher than the positive impact of27.73%; Similarly, based on the statistics data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics data in2009shows that the United States has more than2million people were injured and more than30,000people were claimed lives in a car accident. Among the injured or killed, side car crash contributed40%.Therefore, how to protect the safety of the crew in side impact gets more and more attention of people, and becomes the important research for depot. The related research also suggest that the head of crew is the most vulnerable organs and deadly place in side impact, in order to reduce the head injury,side curtain airbags become the best options for the head protection device. Nonetheless, as the number of cars equipped with side curtain airbags increases, more data is becoming available and more reports of injuries caused by airbags deployment are appearing in the literature. As such, it is important to assess and optimum the mechanisms of injury associated with side curtain airbag deployment and parameters.To solve this problem, considering the configure way of existing airbags about different people’s height, weight, etc. less, it proposed a new way of configuration in this paper first, the configuration placed airbags between A column and B column on the beam in cars, by using the top-down way of popup airbags, it can be effectively reduce the influence of factors such as the height. Second, it studies the influence of head injury on the dummy model, when which with the help of an MDB that impacts the vehicle at45mph. In order to achieve the purpose of reducing the occurrence of head injuries, it optimized the parameters and configuration of the side curtain airbags. So it chooses the following five optimization parameters in this study:1. Airbag-head separation distance,2. Airbag vertical position,3. Trigger time is time difference between when the MDB starts to strike the car and the time when the bag starts to inflate) as variables,4. Different initial temperature inside airbag,5. Number of computational particles employed with the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) to represent the air.Moreover, in order to reduce the computational costs of optimization involving expensive crash simulations, in our study, the computer program Taguchi method was developed. By using the Design of experiment to establish statistical analysis of the experimental matrix, using the signal to noise ratio (S/N) Method of each parameter caused by the expected influence and differences, and using analysis of variance (ANOVA) to analyze the impact of various parameters on the head peak acceleration and HIC36of the dummy. The results showed that it’s more efficient and accurate to judge the dummy injury criterion by head acceleration than HIC36.Due to a variety of conditions, the current research and simulation just was the finite element of the Dodge Neon car model, and the dummy model (50th percentile dummy Ⅲ), which was verified by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Administration (NHTSA). Although it can be improved the protection of side curtain airbags further more by the optimization results, the actual effect needs to be verified further by real collision.