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The development of a major structural welded assembly is a lengthy and expensive project. The design and the development must generate a product that meets requirements and customer expectations. Product engineers and test engineers developing structural weldments are the target audience for this paper. The purpose of this paper is to describe a Design Of Experiments approach that was developed which helps provide qualitative information on a structural weldment's sensitivity to MIG weld variation.

This paper presents the development of a test procedure for evaluation of inadvertent deployment of air bags. The methodology and early development of the procedure is discussed along with additional criteria thought to be required for trucks and sport utility vehicles. Tests conducted address severe off-road use in relation to air bag sensing systems. Data is collected from accelerometers. After worst case test conditions are identified (examples include rough road, snow plowing and jerk towing events), the data is analyzed and comparisons for design decisions can be made.

Airbag systems have been part of passenger car and truck programs since the mid-1980's. However, systems designed for medium and heavy duty truck applications are relatively new. The release of airbag systems for medium duty truck has provided some unique challenges, especially for the airbag sensing systems. Because of the many commercial applications within the medium duty market, the diversity of the sensing environments must be considered when designing and calibrating the airbag sensing system. The 2003 Chevrolet Kodiak and GMC TopKick airbag sensing development included significant work, not only on the development of airbag deployment events but also non-deployment events – events which do not require the airbag to deploy. This paper describes the process used to develop the airbag sensing system deployment events and non-deployment event used in the airbag sensing system calibration.