Simulation of Turbulent Swirling Flows: Gas Turbine Combustor Application and Validation

Many accidents with children or small adults, where the ignition of the airbag leads to dangerous and even fatal injuries for the passengers, have led to a number of efforts to analyse this so-called “Out-of- Position” load case more deeply within the development process of an airbag system. In the framework of simulation systems the fluid-structure interaction between the inflating gas and the airbag fabric has not been taken into account in the past. Recent developments in the LS-DYNA software package allow a fully coupled arbitrary Lagrange-Euler formulation and thus a more exact representation of the airbag deployment process within the simulation system. In the present contribution we will describe the standard procedure, based on the assumption of a uniform pressure distribution in the airbag and the recently achieved advances in LS-DYNA with respect to fluid-structure interaction of the expanding gas and the inflating airbag fabric.