Fluid Structure Interaction and Airbag ALE for Out of Position

A new fluid structure interaction method is presented in the paper. The method is implemented in LSDYA, an explicit three-dimensional multi-physique code. The new algorithm is applied for different problems for industrial applications including airbag deployment in the automotive industry, where a uniform pressure computed empirically is applied to the airbag fabric material. The uniform pressure Airbag simulation does not lead to the right answer for out of position Airbag deployment. An ALE method using fluid mesh for the gas needs to be used to simulate an impact of dummy and the airbag during a crash test. In this paper, we develop the new ALE multi-material formulation and the fluid structure interaction algorithm that we developed in order to solve general fluid structure interaction problems including Airbag inflation using hydrodynamic equations for gas pressure. In the classical uniform pressure problems, the pressure in computed using a simple ideal gas law equation.