A Study on the Quality Assurance for Stable Performance of Passenger Side Airbag 2013-01-0079

The FMVSS 208 advanced air bag rule has brought new technologies into the automotive industry. Low Risk Deployment, Suppression, or a combination of both, have prevailed in the industry to meet the right front passenger requirements for FMVSS 208 compliance. This rule provides the options to conduct low risk deployment (LRD) airbag tests with a 12-months-old infant dummy riding in a rear facing child seat and child dummies representing 3 years and 6 years old children. If the LRD tests do not meet the injury criteria set by NHTSA, vehicle manufacturers have to choose the another option for the suppressing airbag system when infants or children are present at the passenger seat. But this suppressing systems is not the cost effective method, also, contains potential quality problem such as misrecognition passenger age. Thus, the car makers start to choose LRD requirement option and develop new LRD passenger airbag system. A low risk deployment passenger airbag system has been developed to reduce the risk of injuries caused by airbag inflation to small size occupants and improve the restraint of adult occupants in high speed crashes as well. The new passenger airbag system has mounted on the instrument panel in such a way to reduce the inflator outputs. This paper presents a new methodology for improvement of airbag deployment using experimental and analytical research. The significant parameters were determined from screening process of the experiment data. As a result of the number of tests conducted at different conditions, this study was able to determine the range of relevant parameters. Additionally, using simulation model, a parametric study was done. It make to figure out main design factors of low risk deployment of the passenger airbag