Communications: electrical – Land vehicle alarms or indicators – Of collision or contact with external object
Patent
1996-01-29
1998-05-05
Hofsass, Jeffery
Communications: electrical
Land vehicle alarms or indicators
Of collision or contact with external object
3404255, 280734, 280735, 180274, 367 93, B60Q 100
Patent
active
057480753
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The invention was developed above all for timely detection of side collision accidents in on-road vehicles, whose passenger protection system is tripped by means of the output signal of a sensor that detects the traffic accident. In principle, however, it is also suitable for detecting other kinds of collisions, in which portions of the vehicle are deformed.
In the accident, surges and vibrations occur at the deformed impact site, and these surges and vibrations are propagated, at the speed of structure-borne sound via mechanically fixed parts of the vehicle, and/or at the speed of airborne sound via the air, from the impact site to the sensor that furnishes the electronics of the passenger protection system control unit with data about the detected accident.
Many sensors are known that enable detecting not only a traffic accident but also its severity, and that optionally enable tripping a passenger protection system, such as an air bag system. Only if the accident is serious enough should the passenger protection system be tripped--but if so, then as reliably as possible--while conversely, in a minor accident it should not yet be tripped. An example of a serious accident is a side collision with a truck or a sturdy tree at relatively high speed, such as above a relative speed of 25 km/h. A minor accident is one in which this relative speed is especially low and/or if only a lightweight object, such as a bicycle, dents the side door a little but merely temporarily deforms them elastically without causing further damage.
Hence by means of the sensor, the control unit should be adequately able to detect the degree of severity of the accident as well.
In the side collision, long transit times between the impact site and the sensor of the control unit must be avoided, if the control unit is to trip the passenger protection system fast enough. It is therefore unfavorable to mount the sensor at a central point in the vehicle. The sensor must be mounted as close as possible to the impact site. The time between the onset of a side collision and the tripping of the air bag or the like must in fact generally be a few milliseconds (ms) at most, whereas a sensor mounted centrally in the vehicle often, because of the transit time, does not begin to detect the side collision until 10 ms later.
An intrinsically very fast-response sensor is also needed because otherwise the air bag could not be tripped until much too late even if this sensor, or a plurality of such sensors, were mounted in decentralized fashion at (a plurality of) points along the side of the vehicle, such as 3.
In general, the sensors of control units of a vehicle passenger protection system are acceleration or deceleration sensors, which detect the accelerations or decelerations of the vehicle--or more precisely, of the sensor--that occur spontaneously in the accident, or in other words which precisely measure the applicable values of acceleration or deceleration occurring in the sensor or which respond--at least roughly, often only qualitatively instead of quantitatively--to the particular accelerations or decelerations that are typical for such accidents. This type of sensor has a mechanical contact, for instance, which is touched or pushed by a seismic mass or by a body of the vehicle body that is deformed by the accident and which is thereby actuated; for example, see
These sensors thus generally detect only whether a more or less precisely definable limit value for a deceleration or acceleration has or has not been exceeded. In other words, these sensors provide YES/NO statements, as it were a binary output signal, as a not very precise criterion for the onset of an accident. From the sensor output signal, one can no longer detect the course over time of the detected deformation of the vehicle. This mere YES/NO criterion is therefore hardly capable of tripping the passenger protection system individually in accordance with the severity of the accident, and hence of attaining an optimization of
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Bauer Peter
Dirmeyer Josef
Frimberger Manfred
Gruber Robert
Mader Gerhard
Greenberg Laurence A.
Hofsass Jeffery
Lerner Herbert L.
Mannava Ashok
Siemens Aktiengesellschaft
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