On Airbags and How They Help Prevent Car Fatalities
Few individuals realise that the design of airbags - a soft shock absorber to impact against in a crash - has been in existence for over sixty years. The very first patent on an air bag for aeroplanes was filed during World War II. In the 1980s, the first commercial airbags appeared in vehicles.
Up to the present day, stats reveal that airbags cut back the possibility of dying in a square frontal smash by about 30 percent. Now there are also seat mounted and door-mounted side airbags. As amazing as this sounds, some automobiles go far further than just having dual air bags, and alternatively have 6 to 8 airbags.
The goal of an airbag is to decelerate the passenger/driver’s forward movement as smoothly as possible in just a fraction of a second. An air bag can accomplish this goal in three steps:
- The bag is made of a slim, nylon, which is folded inside the dashboard or steering wheel and, more recently, the seat or door
- The sensor is the device that orders the bag to expand. Inflation takes place when there’s a collision force equating to motoring into a wall at 16 to 24 km per hour. A mechanical switch is flipped when there is a mass shift that cuts off an electrical contact, telling the detectors that a smash has occurred. The detectors get data from an accelerometer built into a microprocessor chip
- The airbag’s ballooning system melds sodium azide with potassium nitrate (KNO3) to make nitrogen gas. Hot eruptions of the nitrogen balloon the airbag
Due to the incredibly fast inflation of an airbag, it’s a safety requirement that the driver and passenger sit in an upright position providing a safe distance between their face and the dashboard / steering wheel - this allows time for the airbag to deploy while the driver/passenger are being thrust forward by the affect of the accident.
