Search Results

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has begun a new side impact crashworthiness evaluation of vehicles, using tests that represent impacts from large trucks and sport utility vehicles. This test protocol, intended as consumer information rating of vehicles, adds new challenges to current side impact crashworthiness development in both the vehicle structure and dummy responses. Available tests data seem to indicate that safety enhancement features that work for current US-SID and Euro-SID may not work for the SID-IIs dummy that is used in the IIHS test protocol, but may in fact deteriorate dummy response. This may partly be explained by the fact that the SID-IIs is not a scaled down dummy of either the US-SID or the Euro-SID. This paper presents and discusses the results from sled tests conducted to investigate countermeasures that will help improve the response of the SID-IIs in the Insurance Institute's side impact test.

NHTSA issued the FMVSS 226 ruling in 2011. It established test procedures to evaluate countermeasures that can minimize the likelihood of a complete or partial ejection of vehicle occupants through the side windows during rollover or side impact events. One of the countermeasures that may be used for compliance of this safety ruling is the Side Airbag Inflatable Curtain (SABIC). This paper discusses how three key phases of the optimization strategy in the Design for Six Sigma (DFSS), namely, Identify; Optimize and Verify (I_OV), were implemented in CAE to develop an optimized concept SABIC with respect to the FMVSS 226 test requirements. The simulated SABIC is intended for a generic SUV and potentially also for a generic Truck type vehicle. The improved performance included: minimization of the test results variability and the optimization of the ejection mitigation performance of the SABIC.