Optimization of Passenger Safety Restraint System for USNCAP by Response Surface Methodology

Safety performance of a new car is evaluated through USNCAP and their results in the star rating are provided to the consumers. It is very important to obtain high score of USNCAP to appeal their performance to consumers. Therefore the car companies have made the effort to improve their car safety performance. These efforts should satisfy the demand not only to get high score but also to pass the FMVSS, NHTSA regulations on safety. Huge numbers of car crash tests have been conducted on these bases by car companies. However physical tests spend too much cost and time, as an alternative way, the simulation on the car crash could be a solution to reduce the cost and time. Therefore the simulations have been widely conducted in car industry and various researches on this have been reported. In this study, restraint system had been optimized to minimize the injury of female passenger. Belted female frontal crash test was selected from various test methods of USNCAP for the study. Initial velocity of the test was 56km/h. The combination injury probability of USNCAP was selected as an objective function and the injury limit value, which was defined in FMVSS, was set to an optimization constraint. Many researches that were similar to this study had been conducted, however most of them had limitation that interaction between airbag and safety belt had not been considered. Contrary to these researches, the interaction was considered in this study.