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For the robust passenger NCAP(New Car Assessment Program) 5star and the stable neck injury performance, a new concept of passenger airbag has been required. Especially, the deployment stability and the vent hole control technology of the passenger airbag can be improved. According to these requirements, the deployment stability technique has been studied and the ‘Active Vent’ technology has been developed. As a result, these technologies have led to achieve the robust NCAP rating and are applied to the production vehicles.

The role of CAB is protecting the passenger's head during rollover and side crash accidents. However, the performance of HIC and ejection mitigation has trade-off relation, so analytical method to satisfy the HIC and ejection mitigation performance are required. In this study, 3 types of CAB were used for ejection mitigation analysis, drop tower analysis and SINCAP MDB analysis. Impactor which has 18kg mass is impacting the CAB as 20KPH velocity at six impact positions for ejection mitigation analysis. In drop tower analysis, impactor which has 9kg mass is impacting the CAB as 17.7KPH velocity. Acceleration value was derived by drop tower analysis and the tendency of HIC was estimated. Motion data of a vehicle structure was inserted to substructure model and the SID-IIS 5%ile female dummy was used for SINCAP MDB analysis. As a result, HIC and acceleration values were derived by MDB analysis.

‘Active safety systems’ are actively being developed to prevent collisions. The integration of ‘active safety systems’ and traditional ‘passive safety systems’ such as seatbelt and airbags is an important issue. The ‘Integrated safety’ performance is that comprehensively controls the performance of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ safety systems to reduce occupant injuries. To develop ‘integrated safety’ performance, it is important to develop crash scenarios for autonomous vehicles. This study is about the development of ‘Estimation Tool of Occupant Injury Risk’ for deriving risk integrated safety scenarios focused on occupant injury. The results of random traffic simulation using ‘Virtual Prototype’ were used to select parameters, and ‘MADYMO Equivalent Simplified Vehicle Crash Analysis Model’ was used to derive F-D characteristics for each vehicle collision condition.

The instrument panels are made to meet stiffness requirements and also interior safety regulation such as head impact test. Nowadays, CAE is widely used to predict the test results in advance. However, considering fracture phenomena, the characteristics of material takes a significant role for the simulation of the real tests. In this paper, high speed tensile tests and fracture tests of specimens representing typical stress-states were performed to make a fracture criterion of a plastic material (PC/ABS). The suggested method was validated by comparing simulation with test results.

To achieve a mass goal and minimize the bell mouthing phenomenon of Passenger Air Bag Housing which takes place when the air bag is in explosive action and detrimental to the safety of passenger side because excessive canister bell mouthing may distort and crash the top surface of instrument panel, a study on the replacing process of a PAB housing to a different material and process was performed. The explosive action of current steel PAB housing was firstly analized to evaluate the reaction forces transferred through the PAB and find out the adaptable material for replacing process. Due to the properties among the die casting alloys, the AM60B alloy was chosen for our new material for PAB housing. Then, stress analysis by the finite element method was performed for a design modification of magnesium one piece housing.

In contrast to the other types of crash simulation, integrated analysis is needed to perform the side impact simulation, and the acquired injury values are so sensitive that they are difficult to assess by the deformed vehicle structure itself. Therefore, the accurate FE side impact dummy (US-SID, Euro-SID) models are needed to predict the various injury values in side impact simulation. In the past, rigid body model or coarse FE model have been used. The advantage of these models is low computing power, but they have lack of predictability especially in the high-speed crash analysis such as NCAP and car-to-car simulations. The deviations are caused by inaccurate geometry and improper material characteristic expression of the side impact dummy models. In this paper, the development of new side impact dummy models and their applications at full car simulations are introduced. Also, the analyses about injury values are illustrated in side impact simulation.

In order to reduce the cost and weight of the soft-foamed instrument-panel (IP), we developed the new IP which is made by the 2 kinds of injection methods. One is the compression-injection with back-foamed foil inserted, and the other is two-shot injection with the passenger-side airbag (PAB) door. We named it ‘IMX-IP’ which means that all components (‘X’) of the IP with different resins are made In a Mold. The development procedure of this technology was introduced (1) Design of the new injection mold through TRIZ application, (2) Optimization of the injection conditions and back foamed-foil for minimizing the foam loss and thickness deviation, (3) Development of CAE method for two-shot injection compression, (4) Reliability performance test and application to the mass production. The reduction of the processes through the two-shot molding with back foamed-foil inserted made it possible to enhance soft feeling on IP and reduce the cost and weight simultaneously.

In recent years, pedestrian protection from passenger car impacts has become an important issue. In this study, a lower stiffener system has been implemented in order to reduce lower leg injuries. This system was developed using finite element analyses and impact testing. Injury criteria including bending angle, shear displacement, and deflection were studied in the analyses. These variables were optimized using a DOE (Design of Experiments) sensitivity analysis.

To date, efforts to improve occupant protection in side impact crashes have concentrated on reducing the injuries to occupants seated on the struck side of the vehicle arising from contact with the intruding side structure and/or external objects. Crash investigations indicate that occupants on the struck side of a vehicle may also be injured by contact with an adjacent occupant in the same seating row. Anecdotal information suggests that the injury consequences of occupant-to-occupant impacts can be severe, and sometimes life threatening. Occupant-to-occupant impacts leave little evidence in the vehicle, and hence these impacts can be difficult for crash investigators to detect and may be underreported. The objective of this study was to evaluate the risk of impact injury from occupant-to-occupant impacts in side impact vehicle crashes. The study examined 9608 crashes extracted from NASS/CDS 1993-2006 to investigate the risk of occupant-to-occupant impacts.

Owing to an increasing autonomous emergency braking (AEB) adoption, emergency braking before crash occurs more often than in the case of conventional vehicles. Due to the sudden deceleration in AEB activation, passengers move forward before the crash. To explore how this forward movement affects passenger injury, sled tests are performed with an inclined dummy representing forward displacement. The test shows that a shorter distance between the airbag and passenger results in bigger neck injuries induced by airbag deployment force. A countermeasure is suggested to prevent neck injury in emergency braking situation by reducing deployment force and protrusion.

In recent years, products that make use of integrated safety that use the environmental data to optimize occupant restraints have been on the market. Pre-safe system in the integrated safety category is an adaptive and smart protection system that utilizes the occupant information and the monitoring information on the accident prediction. These pre-safe systems need the proper algorithm corresponding to the crash scenario for the crash unavoidable state. Due to the crash scenario categories for the real world accidents is quite various, the development of the algorithm and the occupant protection system to reduce the injury is quite complex and costly. For this reason, a development process for pre-safe related integrated safety systems demands new tools based on the biomechanics to help design and assessment. The virtual development and assessment process with a viewpoint on the efficiency of the restraint development has been developed.