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James Hubbard, Jr. with Boston University |
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Date: October 24, 2003
Time: 10:30am
Location: NIA, Rm 404
Speaker: James Hubbard, Jr., Boston University
Subject: "Smart Skin Sensors for Automotive Vehicle Safety"
Modern trends in automotive safety are focused on the use of “Energy Management” to mitigate passenger risk in the event of an accident. The goal of controlled energy deployment of airbags for example, is to allow the force on passengers to be modulated, based on vehicle speed, intensity of collision, passenger position and weight and location of the impact. In order to realize such goals, new low cost, intelligent, high-performance ruggedized sensors must be developed. Smart Skin sensors are uniquely suited for such applications. One and two-dimensional spatially distributed smart skin sensors for real-time impact and seat occupant position sensing are presented. These sensors exploit principles of spatial aperture shading of distributed transducers for on-board data processing as applied to piezo-electric polymers, piezo-resistors, etc. which are used as the active sensing medium. Aperture shading is the spatial gain-weighting of a sensor aperture.
Example applications and data are presented for both side impact and airbag deployment. Aperture shading is used to develop the component integrals which compute the intensity of collision, passenger position and weight and location of the impact, vis. the centroid of the force acting over a surface along the specified sensor aperture. Practical implementations of aperture shading are presented which exploit linear constitutive piezoelectric sensor laws and tailored electrode shapes. The sensor output is described by a convolution integral whose kernel is represented as a convolution between the exogenous force distribution applied to the sensing aperture and a weighting function enforced by the shaped electrode. Extensions of Smart Skin technology to aerospace applications and practical commercialization issues and constraints are discussed.
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