Few people know that the idea of airbags – a soft shock absorber to land against in a crash – has been in existence for over 60 years. The first patent on an inflatable crash-landing device for airplanes was lodged during World War 2. In the 80s, the first commercial airbags were present in cars.
To date, stats reveal that airbags cut the possibility of death in a direct head-on crash by as much as 30 percent. Now there are also seat-mounted and door mounted side airbags. In fact, some motorcars go way further than merely having dual air bags, and instead have 6 to 8 air bags.
The task of an air bag is to slow down the passenger/driver’s forward motion as smoothly as possible in only a fraction of a second. There are three parts to an air bag that help achieve this goal:
- The airbag is composed of a slim, nylon fabric, which is packed into the steering wheel or dashboard and, these days, the door or seat
- The detector is the gadget that instructs the airbag to balloon. Inflation occurs when there is a collision force equating to motoring into a brick wall at around 24 km an hour. A switch is thrown when there’s a mass shift that closes an electrical contact, instructing the sensors that a smash has taken place. The sensors obtain information from an accelerometer that’s part of a microchip
- The bag’s ballooning facility mixes sodium azide (NaN3) with potassium nitrate to develop nitrogen gas. Hot eruptions of the nitrogen gas balloon the air bag
Because of the incredibly fast inflation of an air bag, it’s fundamental the driver and passenger sit in the seat with a straight back giving a reasonable space between their face and the dashboard / steering wheel – this leaves time for the airbag to balloon while the driver/passenger are being forced forward by the shock of the crash.
