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

Abstract

In the modern automotive industry, game engines are gradually gaining traction for applications such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and synthetic data generation. As modern game engines have advanced in their ability to handle computationally intensive simulations, there remains relatively little research on their use in safety engineering, particularly in the area of passive restraint systems such as airbags. This thesis addresses this gap by investigating whether a Pelvic Restraint Cush ion (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, namely BeamNG.tech. To answer this research’s question, a modding workflow was developed that involved translating the airbag model from STL into the JBeam format used by BeamNG through Blender, applying a Voronoi clustering method to improve the triangulation and stabilise the JBeam structure, and, through numerous iterations, simulating the PRC 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 with deformable properties while it interacts with rigid-body collisions. This suggests that soft-body approximations can support early-stage testing before progressing to more complex simulation methods. A broader direction for future work is to investigate whether real-time physics solvers can complement conventional CAE tools in passive safety engineering.