An atlanto-occipital dislocation is a rare airbag-induced injury in trauma patients. We report a case of an atlanto-occipital dislocation in a 6-year-old patient who was an unrestrained passenger in the front seat of a vehicle involved in a low-speed motor vehicle accident. This case illustrates the fatal threat of airbag deployment to the child passenger travelling in the vehicle front seat ev...

In recent years many accidents happened with passengers that were out of position when their airbag deployed. Therefore new safety regulations have come into effect and an airbag now has to meet several requirements that concern out of positioning. In meeting these requirements simulations of folding and deploying airbags are very useful and are widely used. The paper presents a simulation meth...

In this paper, we proposed an occupant detection system using single video camera and a distance sensor for an advanced airbag deployment. We detected occupant face using skin color and motion information in real time. The proposed method acquired the color and size of the occupant face using single video camera and calculated the distance information between the occupant and airbag using a dis...

INTRODUCTION Longitudinal barriers, such as guardrails, are designed to prevent a vehicle that leaves the roadway from impacting a more dangerous object while minimizing the risk of injury to the vehicle occupants. Current full-scale test procedures for these devices do not consider the effect of occupant restraints such as seatbelts and airbags. The purpose of this study was to determine the e...

The UMTRI Airbag Skin Burn Model has been improved through laboratory testing and the implementation of a more flexible heat transfer model. A new impinging jet module based on laboratory measurements of heat flux due to high-velocity gas jets has been added, along with an implicit finite-difference skin conduction module. The new model can be used with airbag gas dynamics simulation outputs, o...

Historically, assessments of frontal crash safety have been based primarily on the measured responses of 50th percentile male dummies in relatively high speed vehicle crashes against a rigid flat barrier. Under such test conditions, the ability of supplementary airbag systems to greatly reduce head injury potential is clearly evident in crash tests performed by Transport Canada and others. Howe...

The paper presents a new simulation method for airbags with multiple compartments. In recent years many accidents happened with passengers that were out of position (OOP) when their airbag deployed. Therefore new safety regulations have come into effect in the USA and an airbag now has to meet several requirements that concern out of positioning. In meeting these requirements simulations of dep...

Inflation of an automobile airbag is accomplished by converting sodium azide to nitrogen gas. The bags are vented so that nitrogen and residual byproducts of combustion, such as alkaline gas, are released into the passenger compartment. We report the case of a patient who incurred a chemical keratitis after the driver's-side airbag deployed. The importance of recognition and management is discu...