Systems and Methods of Numerically Simulating Structural Behaviors of Airbag Made of Coated Fabric Material

摘要

Methods for numerically simulating the structural behavior of an airbag made of a coated textile material are disclosed. A special purpose finite element is constructed to include the membrane element and a pair of dynamically constructed slave elements, providing additional bending resistance of the coated fabric material. In each solution cycle of the time-advanced simulation, the positions of the nodes of the slave elements are updated from the normal vector of the corresponding average node, the fabric thickness, and the coating thickness of the coated fabric material. The average node's normal vector is the average of the element normal vectors of the membrane elements connected to that particular node. The positions of each node are offset along a mean normal vector at a certain distance from either side of the corresponding node of the membrane element. Using the updated node positions, strains and stresses of the slave elements are obtained and then converted to the internal node's forces for additional bending resistance.