Not many people realise that the concept of the airbag - a soft cushion to land against in a crash - has been around for many years. The first patent on an air bag for air planes was filed during World War II. During the 80s, the very first commercial airbags were present in motorcars.
Up to the present day, stats indicate that air bags reduce the risk of dying in a straight frontal smash by about thirty percent. Now we also have seat-mounted and door-mounted side airbags. Incredibly, some cars go far further than just having dual airbags, and instead have six to eight airbags.
An airbag’s job is to slow the advanced movement of the driver in only a split second. There are 3 components to an airbag that help achieve this job:
- The bag is composed of a thin, nylon fabric that’s packed inside the steering wheel or dashboard and, these days, the seat or door
- The sensor is the gadget that instructs the airbag to expand. Ballooning occurs when there is a collision force equal to running into a wall at 16 to 24 km an hour. A switch is flipped when there’s a mass shift that cuts off an electrical contact, informing the sensors that a crash has happened. The detectors get information from an accelerometer that’s part of a microprocessor chip
- The airbag’s ballooning system mixes sodium azide with potassium nitrate to develop nitrogen gas. Hot blasts of the nitrogen gas expand 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 an upright position providing a safe distance between their face and the dashboard / steering wheel - this provides time for the bag to balloon while the driver/passenger are being pushed forwards by the impact of the smash.
