Development of plastic passenger air bag (PAB) housing for replacing the steel PAB housing and reducing the automobile weight

This paper is concerned with the development of plastic passenger air bag (PAB) housing in order to replace the conventional heavy and expensive steel PAB housing. The optimum plastic thickness and molding conditions are determined by utilizing the parametric injection molding analysis and Taguchi design of experiments. The mold is reversely designed to compensate the inherent deformation of plastic PAB housing after molding. The plastic PAB housing is molded under the optimum molding conditions, and the maximum deformation and the total weight are measured and compared with the conventional steel PAB housing. In order to evaluate the performance of plastic PAB housing, the spread out test and the damage inspection are performed at the level of air bag housing assembly. It is found that the total weight is reduced by 23% and the inherent maximum deformation is less than 0.2 mm. Furthermore, it is found that the plastic PAB housing successfully passes all the evaluation tests.