Seat belt control : application to an experimental setup

It is a fact that the safety of transportation by motor vehicles has increased in the past decades. The number of fatalities related to car crashes even decreased during a period of time were the average travelled distance has doubled. However, the number of fatalities can still be reduced further. Besides that, it is expected that number of vehicles on the road will rise due to growing economies in the developing countries. Therefore, it is important that more sophisticated car safety systems are developed. The most well-known safety system which is present in all modern cars, is the three point seat belt. This system ensures that an occupant is restraint in his seat during a collision, which reduces the changes on injury. However, this system can be further improved as stated by E.P. van der Laan in his PhD study. This study resulted in a continuous restraint control (CRC) system consisting of a semi-active hydraulic actuator installed on experimental setup and theoretical control strategy. The aim of this bachelor's thesis is to analyze the behavior of the installed current amplier and improve its tracking performance of the reference signal provided by the control algorithm. Futhermore, the crash sleds motion prediction and the setpoint computation of the torso deceleration have to be developed for the experimental setup. In this report the following subjects are discussed. The rst chapter describes the experimental setup and its components. The analysis of the current tracking behavior and the improvement thereof are discussed in Chapter 3 and 4, respectively. In Chapter 5 the theoretical performance of the actuator is computed, which is used to determine which crash test can be performed. These crash tests are described in Chapter 6. During these experiments problems with the amplier occurred which are discussed in Chapter 7. This is followed by Chapter 8 which covers the application of the prediction algorithm developed by Van der Laan to the experimental setup. Finally, the conclusion and recommendations can be found in Chapter 9 and 10, respectively