Research On Automotive Side Curtain Airbag

Research shows that occupant’s head has a "secondary collision" with car easily. Lack of effective passive occupant protection measures result in head injury and even cause life-threatening. Existing study suggests that some of the occupant restraint system (such as airbag, seat belt) can help to reduce the risk of head injury and improve the safety of the occupant effectively. But for the side curtain airbag interaction with the occupant, the side curtain airbag hurt occupant has become hot issue in automotive passive safety research, in order to reveal the interaction between the side curtain airbag and human model accurately and effectively, and to study the parameters of side curtain airbag in response on the head injury of occupant, a research is conducted based on the Hybrid Ⅲ dummy model and Dodge Neon four-door full-scale finite element model,specific work can be summarized as follows:For the existing shortcomings about side curtain airbags, a conceptual design and research is made for the side curtain airbags based on the four door sedan,then two kinds of new side curtain airbag which can inflate to unfold were proposed, three-dimensional models of the curtain airbag were created.One of the curtain airbags installed in the body curved steel beams which throughout the front and rear of the car,providing a protective on the occupant’s head,the other side curtain airbag installed in the body curved steel beams and the threshold of the car,providing protective on the occupant’s head,chest,and abdomen somewhere.There are five parameters including the number of computational particles to represent the amount of air, moving deformable barrier (MDB) strike velocity,the airbag-head separation distance, ambient temperature, and trigger times,to study the five parameters in response to occupant head injury,with one of the curtain airbag as prototype model,side crash simulation is conducted between Dodge Neon four-door full-scale finite element model which fitted with Hybrid Ⅲ dummy model and moving deformable barrier,on the basis of experimental design made by Minitab, use of the collision solver LS-DYNA to solve K words of the model and use of SinapsPlus of Ls-Pre/Post analyze the results,then head injury criterion HIC36and peak head acceleration about side curtain airbag interaction with50th percentile Hybrid Ⅲ dummy are obtained.With the simulation experiment, the results show that:The DOE study indicated that the trigger time, the head-airbag separation distance, and the number of particles to represent the amount of air were much more important influence parameters for the head injury than the temperature at the time of the crash or the velocity of the impact,the greater the number of particles,the more secure the dummy,it indicates that curtain airbag can reduce the probability of head injury in “secondary collision”.But there is a new problem:the head injury criterion HIC36is also high even the model fitted with a curtain airbag when parameter setted unreasonable,and the occupant’s head will be subject to suffer. To predict the real situation of occupant’s head injury by analysis of the parameter side curtain airbag in response on the occupant’s head injury, it provides theoretical basis for side impact safety study,and contributes to shorten the development cycle of the side curtain airbag,further,it also provides reference for the structural design of side curtain airbag.