To support automotive manufacturers and their suppliers across North America, MGA Research has shown continued dedication to safety through testing for onboard vehicle safety systems across multiple facilities including Alabama, South Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Canada. The airbags can be deployed in almost any orientation, but typically they are rigidly mounted to a fixture that orients them as if they were installed in the vehicle or the airbags are deployed within a trimmed vehicle. Each facility is also able to test deployments at a variety of temperatures and humidities through the use of various sized chambers and can provide custom fixtures for unique deployment specifications.

 

MGA’s multi-purpose testing facility located in Lincoln, Alabama is equipped to deploy a variety of airbags in order to support both development and conformity of production for automotive OEMs and suppliers in the southeast. The Alabama laboratory has the capability to safely deploy any airbag at a large variety of temperatures, from ambient room temperatures to extreme hot and extreme cold as well as at a variety of humidity levels.

 

 

Our Alabama facility’s chamber inventory includes:

  • Environmental chambers that can create a variety of climates with temperatures ranging from -40°C to 100°C and any humidity ranging from 0% to fully saturated
  • Drive-in chambers that are large enough to soak an entire vehicle used most frequently for deploying curtain airbags
  • Walk-in chambers for smaller component airbag testing such as the ones installed in first and second row seats, passenger and knee, and of course the familiar steering wheel airbags for drivers. Several walk in chambers also have plexiglass sides allowing for external viewing of in-chamber deployments

 

Airbags are monitored for full deployment time and distance relative to its initial position and anomalies in customer specific areas of interest like trim fragmentation. We can track the distance an airbag travels by deploying them next to a grid that is parallel to the direction of travel. Each of our deployments are recorded using high speed cameras at rates of up to 3000 frames per second. Using these videos alongside a computer software, we can precisely determine the distance an airbag traveled during the deployment.  The data we collect provides our customers the time of inflation, distance of travel, and a temperature log.

 

 

At MGA, we take pride in our work and consider airbag testing one of our specialties. Our experienced team of engineers and subject matter experts are reliable and have the ability to adapt to almost any test request.