Not many individuals realise that the concept of the air bag - a soft buffer to land against in a smash - has been around for over sixty years. The first patent on an airbag for aeroplanes was filed during World War Two. In the 80s, the very first commercial airbags were a safety feature in automobiles.
Up to the present day, stats indicate that airbags cut the chance of dying in a square anterior crash by around 30 percent. Now we also have door mounted side and seat-mounted air bags. As a matter of fact, some cars go far further than merely having two air bags, and alternatively have 6 to 8 air bags.
An airbag’s job is to decelerate the advanced motion of the driver in only a fraction of a second. An airbag can achieve this goal in 3 steps:
- The bag is made of a slim, nylon that’s compressed into the dashboard or steering wheel and, more recently, the seat or door
- The detector is the device that instructs the bag to expand. Inflation happens when there is a collision force equating to driving into a wall at 16 to 24 km an hour. A switch is flipped when there is a mass shift that closes an electrical contact, notifying the sensors that a smash has occurred. The sensors get data from an accelerometer built into a microprocessor chip
- The airbag’s expansion facility reacts sodium azide (NaN3) with potassium nitrate (KNO3) to develop nitrogen gas. Hot eruptions of the nitrogen expand the air bag
Because of the superfast deployment of an air bag, it’s a safety requirement that the driver and passenger sit in an upright position providing a safe space between their face and the steering wheel / dashboard - this provides time for the bag to expand while the passenger/driver are being pushed forward by the impact of the accident.