Continuous improvement of side airbag safety performance is an important step because it is associated with many public domain tests and regulations. Thus, occupant restraint with a side airbag is critical and it is necessary to develop tools that can be utilized to help in design of side airbags. Though many papers on side impact safety have been published, only a few papers are related to MADYMO simulations of side airbags.
This paper describes an improved injury prediction and optimization approach using a MADYMO model for side impact. This model consists of 3 parts: dummy, trim and airbag in FEM. In this study, a side impact with a ES-2, EuroSID-2, was simulated in MADYMO as follows:
First, component tests were conducted for trim and airbag respectively to establish correlation. Second, these component models were then integrated into a MADYMO model, which has high correlation with a crash simulator that is capable of replicating physical vehicle tests. Key points were replication of chest deflections and sensitivity responses. Door intrusion and airbag vent hole size were main parameters used to evaluate the sensitivity. As a result, it was demonstrated that this model has a reasonable response and good correlation.
The side airbag was optimized, from the robustness point of view, using an optimization Genetic Algorithm and Quality Engineering for the Euro NCAP mode. Then, results from those two approaches were compared.