A CAE Methodology to Simulate Testing a Rearward Facing Infant Seat during FMVSS 208 Low Risk Deployment

The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard or FMVSS 208 requires passenger cars, multi-purpose vehicles, trucks with less than unloaded vehicle weight of 2,495 kg either to have an automatic suppression feature or to pass the injury criteria specified under low risk deployment test requirement for a 1 year old dummy in rearward and forward facing restraints as well as a forward facing 3 and 6 year old dummy. A convertible child seat was installed in a sub-system test buck representing a passenger car environment with a one-year- old dummy in it at the passenger side seat and a passenger side airbag was deployed toward the convertible child seat. A MADYMO model was built to represent the test scenario and the model was correlated and validated to the results from the experiment. After the validation, the MADYMO model with a folded passenger airbag was used as a baseline of a parametric study to predict how the kinematics and responses of the 1 year old dummy in the rear facing infant seat at the passenger side are affected by the thickness of the child seat and the distance from the child seat to the instrumental panel. The MADYMO model was built in the version 6.3 environment and CFD, or Computational Fluid Dynamics provided by the MADYMO code deployed the passenger side airbag while the convertible child seat was modelled in finite elements. The highest dummy numbers were chosen as responses for the main effect study and the trends for those dummy numbers were investigated varying the above mentioned input factors.