A Look at How Airbags Help Prevent Serious Injury
Not many individuals know that the concept of airbags – a soft cushion to land against in a smash – has been in existence for decades. The first patent on an airbag for air planes was filed during World War Two. During the 80s, the very first commercial airbags were a safety feature in motorcars.
To date, statistics show that airbags cut the chance of death in a straight head-on smash by around 30 percent. Now we also have seat mounted and door-mounted side airbags. In fact, some cars go way beyond only having two airbags, and instead have 6 to 8 airbags.
The purpose of an airbag is to decelerate the passenger/driver’s forward motion as evenly as possible in only a split second. An air bag can achieve this goal in 3 steps:
- The airbag itself is made of a thin, nylon that’s packed into the dashboard or steering wheel and, more recently, the door or seat
- The detector is the gadget that instructs the airbag to expand. Ballooning occurs when there’s a crash force equal to motoring into a brick wall at around 24 km an hour. A mechanical switch is thrown when there is a weight movement that cuts off an electrical contact, informing the sensors that a crash has taken place. The sensors get data from an accelerometer that’s part of a microchip
- The airbag’s expansion facility melds sodium azide with potassium nitrate (KNO3) to make nitrogen gas. Hot blasts of the nitrogen blow up the air bag
Because of the superfast inflation of an air bag, it’s a safety requirement that the passenger and driver sit in the seat with a straight back providing a reasonable distance between their face and the steering wheel / dashboard – this leaves time for the airbag to expand while they are being forced forward by the impact of the smash.
