Abstract
An airbag is composed of housing assembly, door assembly, cushion assembly, and an inflator. The inflator is the essential part that generates gas for airbag. When an airbag is activated, it effectively absorbs the crash energy of the passenger by inflating a cushion. In this study, tank tests were performed with newly synthesized propellants with various compositions, and the results are compared with the numerical results. In the simulation of inflator, a zonal model has been adopted which consisted of four zones of flow regions: combustion chamber, filter, gas plenum, and discharge tank. Each zone was described by the conservation equations with specified constitutive relations for gas. The pressure and temperature of each zone of the inflator were calculated and analyzed and the results were compared with the tank test data. In the zone of discharge tank the pressure quickly rose, the pattern of pressure curve was very similar to the pressure curve of real test. And in zone 1 & 2 & 3 the mass of products was increased and decreased with time. In zone 4, the mass of products was increased with time like real inflator. From the similarity of pressure curve in zone 4 and closed bomb calculation the modeled results are well correlated with the experimental values.
