Not many individuals realise that the idea of airbags - a soft cushion to land against in a crash - has been in existence for decades. The very first patent on an air bag for aeroplanes was registered during World War 2. During the 1980s, the very first commercial airbags were present in vehicles.
Up to now, statistics show that airbags cut back the chance of death in a square frontal smash by about thirty percent. Now we also have door mounted side and seat-mounted airbags. As amazing as this sounds, some automobiles go far beyond just having two airbags, and instead have six to eight air bags.
The task of an air bag is to decelerate the passenger’s forward motion as evenly as possible in only a fraction of a second. There are three parts to an airbag that help execute this goal:
- The airbag is made of a thin, nylon fabric, which is folded into the dashboard or steering wheel and, nowadays, the seat or door
- The detector is the gadget that tells the airbag to balloon. Ballooning takes place when there is a crash force equating to driving into a wall at around 24 km an hour. A switch is flipped when there is a weight shift that cuts off an electrical contact, notifying the detectors that a smash has happened. The sensors receive data from an accelerometer that’s part of a silicon chip
- The airbag’s inflation system melds sodium azide with potassium nitrate to develop nitrogen gas. Hot gusts of the nitrogen gas blow up the air bag
Because of the incredibly fast expansion of an air bag, it’s a safety requirement that the driver and passenger sit in the seat with a straight back allowing a safe distance between their face and the steering wheel / dashboard - this leaves time for the bag to balloon while they are being forced forward by the affect of the crash.
