Airbag Simulation with LS-DYNA Past – Present – Future

During the last decade the simulation of the airbag deployment process has become a standard application of explicit finite element codes. At the beginning of the development the focus was to capture the influence and improve the results of dummy impact on fully inflated airbags. Later the deployment kinematics of folded airbags, different folding techniques and vent-hole design became more and more important. With the requirement to comply with FMVSS 208, i.e. Out-of-Position load cases, it became apparently necessary to include the interaction between the internal gas flow and the fabric airbag structure. Hence coupled algorithms that allow for interaction between the discretized gas flow and the airbag structure were the main focus during the past five years. The present paper aims to sketch the development history of airbag deployment simulations from the very beginning of the late 1980s to the current, highly sophisticated models available in LS-DYNA. Different modelling techniques will be shown and their advantages, drawbacks and the necessary effort to gain useful results will be discussed.