Magneto-rheological damper design characteristics for vehicle airbag replacement

Abstract

Vehicle crashes continue to occur despite all the human efforts to prevent them resulting in injuries and loss of lives. The implementation of airbags has been shown to offer passenger safety in a collision. However, premature deployment and malfunction of airbag has resulted in fatalities and injuries to drivers and front seat passengers. In this study, a magneto-rheological (MR) damper is used as a replacement of airbag in vehicles to serve as a protective system. MR damper is a smart damping device which can be programmed to dynamically absorb shocks and high impact force when used in application such as passenger cars. In this paper, G-force profile of the airbag vehicle crashing system is compared with the G-force profile obtained from the MR damper vehicle crashing system. Subsequently, for this purpose MR damper characteristics are designed and Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) and Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller are proposed for MR damper current control. Simulation results proved that fuzzy based MR damper system yields better results compared to PID based MR damper system and airbag vehicle crashing system.