Abstract
This paper has been prepared by a team in the Passive Safety of our company IDIADA and it talk about padding as a way to improve occupant protection in side crashes of passenger cars.
In this paper we will point out the essentials of a side crash. We will review the technologies available to reduce injuries, and will choose one of them, which is the incorporation of cushioning (that is, padding) as a part of the trim, as a focus for our attention. At this point we will make some primary considerations about padding characteristics, such as material, design requirements and so on. After this we will review the existing techniques for padding development and point out the advantages of each of them.
Finally, we will present some results obtained by our team which will show that the use of light-weight materials as padding can be an effective way to improve side impact crashworthiness.