The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards No. 208 includes directives rendering the morphological estimation of passengers mandatory for advanced air bag systems. As morphological estimation and position detection will soon be mandatory prior to air bag activation, many studies have been carried out. Some systems proposed give access to morphological or position information using ultrasonic, strain gauges capacitive measurements as in the BIOVOLUME technology. BIOVOLUME capacitive sensors simply comprise conducting strips. They are therefore cheap, robust and can be easily integrated in the seats of modern vehicles without adding unreasonable cost. Furthermore as they directly yield both position and morphology information, they are fit for stand-alone application to the dynamic automatic suppression system of advanced air bags. It is public knowledge that the response of such sensors depends on hygrometry and temperature. Another well known issue for the capacitive sensor is that the response of such sensors depends on the passenger to seat distance. As this distance is not constant because it depends on passenger clothing as well as on additional equipment such as bead seat cover, it has to be taken into account. We propose a design for such sensors that adding information to the classical capacitive measurements allows us to correct their measurements from the influence of ambient conditions and distance.
Morphological capacitive sensors for air bag applications
Kapazitive Sensoren für Airbag-Anwendungen
Sensor Review ; 23 , 4 ; 345-351
2003
7 Seiten, 14 Bilder, 5 Quellen
Article (Journal)
English
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