Land vehicles – Wheeled – Attachment
Reexamination Certificate
1999-12-20
2002-07-16
Mai, Lanna (Department: 3619)
Land vehicles
Wheeled
Attachment
C280S743100, C139S389000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06419263
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to a system for, and method of, providing a seamless inflatable member such as an inflatable bag or seat belt, in a vehicle and inflating the member to protect an occupant when a collision involving the vehicle occurs.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Safety of occupants in vehicles is an important concern to manufacturers of the vehicles and to the occupants of the vehicles. The manufacturers have disposed seat belts, some partially or wholly inflatable, and inflatable air bags in the vehicles to protect the occupants when collisions involving the vehicle occur. An inflatable member (this term is used herein to describe an air bag as well as an inflatable belt or an inflatable belt portion) becomes inflated upon the occurrence of a collision involving a vehicle to reduce the occupant's velocity and deceleration below unacceptable rates and to limit the occupant's movement to enhance the occupant's safety. Many manufacturers have started to provide inflatable members for occupants of the front driver seat of an automobile. Most automobile manufacturers now provide 3-point seat belts which include a shoulder belt portion and a lap belt portion. Most aircraft passenger seats are now provided with 2-point seat belts which include only a lap belt portion. The number of points refers to the number of anchors or retainers that affix the safety belt system for an occupant.
Perhaps the most significant consideration in a vehicle containing an inflatable member relates to the fact that such a member cannot begin to restrain the occupant's motion during the vehicle collision until the occupant has moved into engagement with such member. Air bags that are typically deployed from the dashboard or steering wheel waste an important portion of the time and deceleration space available to protect the occupant against injury. This markedly reduces the occupant's protection from the level that can be provided if the restraint is initiated before the occupant has moved within the vehicle after initiation of the vehicle collision.
Non-inflatable seat belts now in use suffer from certain significant disadvantages. For example, although certain selected designs of seat belts can, through the use of pre-tensioning devices, begin a restraint of the occupant earlier than the restraint provided by an air bag deployed from the dashboard or steering wheel, such belts do not provide for control of the occupant's head motion. This shortened deceleration time, however, has caused markedly higher decelerations and loadings, at least of the occupant's head, and has produced less than desirable results from the standpoint of injury thereto.
Seat belts are also often of narrow physical construction and thus have not provided for the distribution of the restraining loads over wide areas of the occupant's body. This has resulted in unnecessarily high loads being imposed upon the occupant over the limited portion of the occupant's body in engagement with the seat belt when a collision involving the vehicle occurs. Additionally such belts have possessed an elongation that, in many situations, has allowed the head of an occupant to strike the steering wheel or the dashboard when the occupant has been seated in a front seat.
Furthermore, the spooling out of the webbing material in the seat belt and the stretching of the seat belt have contributed to an increased duration of the unrestrained motion of the occupant before any effective restraint. This has meant that the motion of the occupant has had to be brought to a stop in a shorter time than would have been possible if the seat belt had not elongated. This has contributed to the production of undesirably high rates of motion and deceleration on the occupant during the restraint imposed by the seat belt on the movement of the occupant.
Use of inflatable seat belts of the types known in the prior art does not overcome all of the deficiencies and disadvantages discussed above. Many prior attempts at eliminating these deficiencies and disadvantages with inflatable belts have included seat belts with a pair of inflatable sections within the belt (one for the shoulder belt portion, the other for the lap belt portion) and have additionally required the inflation of these sections to be accomplished by larger than desirable inflators. Many previous attempts at producing satisfactory inflatable belts have also resulted in serious problems with storing the pair of inflatable sections in the vehicle and have required these inflatable sections to occupy areas that interfere with entrance and egress of the occupant respectively into and from the vehicle.
The deficiencies and disadvantages of many prior art inflatable seat belts have also required the inflators to be positioned at the releasable coupling member and the retainer to be positioned at the sides of the seats. This duality of inflatable sections has caused many significant problems. One of these has been that the inflatable gases have had to pass through conduits located at the buckle attachment point of the belts that are in themselves releasable. This makes the belts and the inflator difficult to package and to operate.
The inflatable belts with dual inflatable sections have had to be attached to mechanisms which allow for variable lengths of the belts to be deployed due to variable sizes and positions of the occupants within the vehicle. This has required the inflator to be located at the buckle location with the aforementioned deficiencies or has required the heavy mass of the inflator to be contained within the inflatable sections of the seat belts. Furthermore, the duality of inflatable sections has required additional inflators, squibs, wiring and the like to be used since both of the inflatable sections in the pair have had to be simultaneously inflated.
Most inflatable seat belts known in the prior art have other significant deficiencies and disadvantages. For example, they do not adequately protect the occupant's neck and head in a side collision. Furthermore, they also do not adequately protect the occupant's lower extremities. This results from the fact that the front seat occupant's lower extremities tend to slide forward against the instrument panel at the time of the collision while the occupant in the rear seat tends to slide against the rear of the front seat. This “submarining” has caused the occupants to incur injuries to the lower extremities.
The inflators associated with most prior inflatable seat belts have operated in an inefficient thermodynamic manner, and thus have required relatively large amounts of pyrotechnic materials to be provided in the inflators so that the size and weight of the inflators have had to be increased to undesirable proportions. The amount of the pyrotechnic material required in most of the inflators of the prior art has been roughly between fifty percent (50%) to one hundred percent (100%) more than is used in the preferred inflator of this invention. As a result, acceptable packaging of most prior art inflatable belts and the inflator within a vehicle has been precluded.
The configuration and composition of the combustible materials used in most existing inflators have also produced relatively slow inflation systems. These slow inflation systems, while useful for air bags, have not been useful for inflatable seat belts since such restraints must deploy in less than one fourth of the time for the deployment of a typical air bag, to be effective, particularly to provide occupant protection from side impacts. The deceleration distance of a vehicle involved in a side collision and the time interval between the initiation of the side impact against the vehicle and the striking of the occupant against an interior vehicle surface are greatly reduced relative to the distance and time for a front impact.
The combustible materials for some of these known systems have also required filters to collect the solid particulates that are produced in operation. Other known system
Büsgen Alexander
Cross S. Jay
Morris, Jr. Edward Lee
Roemke Lowell William
Walthall William Lewis
Holden Jerry J.
Ilan Ruth
Mai Lanna
The B. F. Goodrich Company
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