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The presented study was directed at two types of airbag mis-deployments: late deployment and non-deployment. Late deployment can be a product of override or underride road traffic accidents. Non-deployment can be a product of technical failure or trigger algorithm’s inability to correctly assume the state of the accident to happen.
In order to analyse the phenomena through physical tests, a specialized test device was used for a series of 8 non-deployment tests and a series of 4 airbag firing tests, totalling 12 tests.
Acceleration based data was recorded and analysed for the movement of the device part simulating the driver head. High speed video recording was used to analyse the mechanics of airbag deployment and correlate with the acceleration based data. It has been determined, in the limitations of the laboratory testing environment, a significant variation of the time frame for the airbag deployments, despite using similar testing conditions and identical tested products. Also, the initial time frame for airbag deployment delay was overshadowed by other factors such as time to impact.

vehicle safety; airbag