CAE analysis of Passenger Airbag Bursting through Instrumental Panel based on Corpuscular Particle Method

The safety regulation requires that passenger airbag (PAB) to deploy into working position in time without causing any fragmentation of its surrounding structure. Due to the significant load of airbag deployment and its complex unfolding process, it is always a challenge to design a PAB system which enables airbag safely bursting through instrumental panel. A CAE based approach has been developed at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) to lead the passenger airbag system design. The foundation of the CAE approach is to model the airbag bursting loading condition representatively. Hence the corpuscular particle method (CPM) has been applied in passenger airbag model building. Compared to control volume (CV) airbag model, CPM model can provide vital information of early gas dynamic and local pressure distribution of PAB deployment. It is the key to understand the loading condition before PAB door splitting. The JLR CAE simulation with CPM successfully predicted initial PAB bursting load. As the results, the PAB door splitting kinematics achieved good correlation between the simulation and test results. More importantly, the CAE analysis highlighted the stress concentration area of the key components such as PAB chute, door, hinge and housing; identified the potential failure modes. Based on the CAE results, further design optimisation and verification had been conducted; the system weakness was corrected at the design stage.