A numerical study of passenger side airbag deployment based on arbitrary Lagrangian-eulerian method

The passenger side airbags (PAB) are usually larger than the driver airbags. Therefore, the inflator of PAB is more powerful with high mass rate. In this paper, an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) method based computational method is developed to simulate the deployment of a PAB. The tank test is used to test the property of the inflator. Through comparison of numerical and experimental results, the ALE method is validated. Based on a failed airbag test, a smaller sub-airbag is placed inside PAB to disperse the gas flow to directions which are less damaging. By applying dynamic relaxation, the initial mesh corresponding to the experimental terms is obtained. The results indicate that the interior pressure and impact force coincide with the test data, and the method in this paper is capable of capturing airbag deploying process of the PAB module accurately.