Seat mounted side impact airbags (SIAB) along with side curtain airbags are now a standard passive safety equipment offered by nearly all original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to meet side protection requirements in many regions of the world. While the side curtain airbag is intended to reduce head injury, the SIAB protects the thorax and abdomen region of the driver or passenger in a side crash scenario. An optimized SIAB both in terms of design and deployment threshold has the potential to reduce occupant’s injury level and can prevent fatalities.
Because of the limited space available between the occupant and the side structure of the vehicle, there are significant challenges posed for packaging a SIAB to provide adequate cushioning distance from the intruding parts of the vehicle side structure and spread the impact load over a larger area. Different regulatory requirements in different geographies add further challenges for a common design. Common design is not only cost-effective, but it also simplifies manufacturing.
Exhaustive studies have been published on vehicle structure optimization in a crash scenario, but only a handful of literature is available on SIAB design and development study.
The present work depicts a detailed study of SIAB performance in terms of occupant injury criteria and the effect of various SIAB design parameters under various side crash load cases, such as defined by IIHS, USNCAP, FMVSS and other agencies. Key design parameters effecting the performance are identified and subsequently SIAB design parameters were optimized based on a Response Surface Method (RSM). This study details a process to commonize the SIAB design across the geographies. SIAB parameters are optimized in the current study for load cases in the United States and China. The optimized airbag shape is validated further using Ls Dyna runs. A response-surface-based injury prediction is reasonably consistent with the results of the Dyna.
This approach will allow us to determine the shape of a side pelvic thorax airbag and help to understand how altering different design parameters affects performance (rib injury values).