A game engine’s application for passive safety engineering - A feasibility study of mass-spring modelling for inflated airbag simulation in BeamNG.tech

Sammanfattning

In the modern automotive industry, game engines are gradually gaining traction forapplications such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and syntheticdata generation. As modern game engines have advanced in their ability to handlecomputationally intensive simulations, there remains relatively little research ontheir use in safety engineering, particularly in the area of passive restraint systemssuch as airbags.This thesis addresses this gap by investigating whether a Pelvic Restraint Cushion (PRC) airbag can be simulated as a soft body using the mass-spring modelling approach implemented in the physics solver of a modern game engine, namelyBeamNG.tech.To answer this research’s question, a modding workflow was developed that involvedtranslating the airbag model from STL into the JBeam format used by BeamNGthrough Blender, applying a Voronoi clustering method to improve the triangulationand stabilise the JBeam structure, and, through numerous iterations, simulating thePRC airbag within the BeamNG.tech environment. The results show that, with careful parameter tuning, it is possible to stably simulate the airbag as a soft body withdeformable properties while it interacts with rigid-body collisions. This suggeststhat soft-body approximations can support early-stage testing before progressing tomore complex simulation methods. A broader direction for future work is to investigate whether real-time physics solvers can complement conventional CAE tools inpassive safety engineering.