Abstract
Many car manufacturers have frequently adopted an aggressive inflator and a lower threshold speed for airbag deployment in order to meet an injury requirement for unbolted occupant at high speed crash test. Consequently, today's occupant safety restraint system has a weakness due to an airbag induced injury at low speed crash event. This paper proposes a new crash algorithm to improve the weakness by suppressing airbag deployment at low speed crash event in case of belted condition. The proposed algorithm consists of two major blocks-crash severity algorithm and deployment logic block. The first block decides crash severity with two levels by means of velocity and crash energy calculation from acceleration signal. The second block implemented by simple AND/OR logic combines the crash severity level and seat belt status information to generate firing commands for airbag and belt pretensioner. Furthermore, it can be extended to adopt additional sensor information from passenger presence detection sensor and safing sensor. A simulation using real crash data for a 1,800cc passenger vehicle has been conducted to verify the performance of proposed algorithm.