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

Abstract

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.

Optimization of Plastic Speed Meter Housing for Automobiles: Injection Molding Simulation, Taguchi Method and Machine Learning

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“…Han et al reported a study applying the Taguchi method to develop a plastic airbag housing to protect passengers in the passenger seat of a car. In the study, the main factors affecting the deformation of the airbag housing were identified and optimized using molding simulations and applied to the development of the injection mold [7]. Hentati et al studied using molding experiments and experimental designs investigate whether the injection pressure of PC/ABS molded products is a molding factor with the greatest influence on the shear stress of the molded product [8].…”

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“…Among the various manufacturing methods, injection molding using plastic material has the advantage of making even complex shapes into a one-time process. Also, it is specialized for the mass production of products with the identical shape and dimensions and is actively used in our daily lives and the industrial sector [1][2][3][4][5][6].…”

Multi response optimization of injection moulding process parameters of polystyrene and polypropylene to minimize surface roughness and shrinkage’s using integrated approach of S/N ratio and composite desirability function

“…With the increase in melt temperature, the thickness between the movable and fixed template is decreased, which shows improvement in uniformity. Han et al (2018) have used Taguchi design to optimize the injection moulding process parameters during the manufacturing of automobile plastic airbag housing. The objective was to reduce the weight by replacing steel housing with plastic housing.…”