In-Plane Pre-Stress Analysis for Automotive Airbag Electronic Control Unit’s Printed Circuit Board Transverse Vibration

For design of automotive airbag electronic control units (AB ECU), it is essential to have a validated and reliable finite element (FE) simulation model in place in order to allow already in an early design stage for the accurate prediction of the ECU’s structural vibration behavior. A “bottom-up” approach which described in the ASME guide for verification and validation (ASME V&V 10-2006) is applied for the validation of the AB ECU simulation model. The AB ECU is decomposed into different assembly level. Single printed circuit board (PCB) is the lowest elementary component level. In the PCB level simulation and validation, the influence of in-plane pre-stress on PCB’s transverse vibration characteristic has been encountered, but it has been found out that the source of the in-plane pre-stress can not be explained by classical beam/plate theory. Analysis and simulation for PCB fixation reveals that the fundamental source of the in-plane pre-stress is structure’s geometric nonlinearity.