Softening the Blow: Car Air Bags
It’s a little known fact that the airbag is not a recent idea, and some people may be astounded to know the design has been around for over 60 years. The first patent on an air bag for air planes was registered during World War 2. In the 1980s, the very first commercial airbags appeared in automobiles.
Up to now, statistics reveal that air bags cut back the chance of death in a direct head-on crash by as much as 30 percent. Now there are also door-mounted side and seat-mounted airbags. Incredibly, some cars go way further than only having two air bags, and instead have 6 to 8 air bags.
The job of an airbag is to slow the passenger’s advanced movement as evenly as possible in only a fraction of a second. An air bag can achieve this task in 3 steps:
- The airbag is composed of a slim, nylon fabric, which is compressed into the dashboard or steering wheel and, more recently, the seat or door
- The sensor is the gadget that orders the airbag to inflate. Expansion occurs when there is a collision force equal to motoring into a brick wall at around 15 miles an hour. A mechanical switch is thrown when there’s a mass movement that cuts off an electrical contact, telling the sensors that a crash has taken place. The sensors get data from an accelerometer built into a microprocessor chip
- The bag’s inflation facility fuses sodium azide (NaN3) with potassium nitrate to produce nitrogen gas. Hot blasts of the nitrogen gas balloon the airbag
Due to the superfast expansion of an air bag, it’s crucial the driver and passenger sit in an upright position giving a safe distance between their face and the dashboard / steering wheel – this provides time for the bag to balloon while they are being thrust forward by the affect of the crash.
No Comments
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
