Airbags and How They Help Prevent Automobile Deaths
The air bag design is nothing new, and some people may be amazed to know the design has been around for over sixty years. The very first patent on an inflatable crash-landing device for airplanes was registered during World War II. In the 80s, the very first commercial airbags were a safety feature in automobiles.
To date, stats indicate that airbags cut back the possibility of death in a direct anterior crash by as much as 30%. Now there are also door mounted side and seat-mounted airbags. In fact, some motorcars go far beyond merely having two airbags, and instead have 6 to 8 air bags.
An airbag’s goal is to slow down the forward motion of the driver in only a fraction of a second. An airbag can achieve this task in three steps:
- The bag is made of a thin, nylon fabric, which is compressed inside the steering wheel or dashboard and, these days, the seat or door
- The detector is the device that instructs the bag to expand. Ballooning takes place when there is a crash force equal to motoring into a brick wall at around 24 km an hour. A switch is flipped when there is a weight shift that cuts off an electric contact, instructing the detectors that a smash has occurred. The detectors get data from an accelerometer that’s part of a microprocessor chip
- The bag’s inflation system melds sodium azide with potassium nitrate to produce nitrogen gas. Hot gusts of the nitrogen gas blow up the air bag
Due to the superfast deployment of an airbag, it’s a safety requirement that the passenger and driver sit in an upright position giving a reasonable distance between their face and the dashboard / steering wheel – this leaves time for the airbag to expand while they are being pushed forward by the impact of the accident.
