UND-Pilsa Blog

Not many people know that airbags are actually not a recent idea, and some individuals may be astonished to realise the design has been around for over sixty years. The very first patent on an airbag for aeroplanes was submitted during World War II. During the 1980s, the first commercial airbags were present in cars.

To date, statistics indicate that air bags cut the chance of dying in a square frontal crash by about 30%. These days we also have door mounted side and seat-mounted air bags. As a matter of fact, some cars go far beyond simply having twin airbags, and alternatively have 6 to 8 air bags.

An airbag’s goal is to slow the forward movement of the driver in just a fraction of a second. There are three components to an airbag that help execute this goal:

• The airbag itself is composed of a slim, nylon fabric that’s compressed inside the steering wheel or dashboard and, these days, the door or seat
• The sensor is the gadget that instructs the airbag to expand. Ballooning takes place when there’s a collision force equating to motoring into a brick wall at around 15 miles an hour. A switch is flicked when there’s a mass movement that cuts off an electric contact, informing the sensors that a crash has happened. The sensors obtain information from an accelerometer built into a micro chip
• The bag’s ballooning facility mixes sodium azide (NaN3) with potassium nitrate (KNO3) to make nitrogen gas. Hot gusts of the gas inflate the air bag

Due to the very fast inflation of an air bag, it’s a safety requirement that the driver and passenger sit in an upright position leaving a reasonable distance between the steering wheel / dashboard and their face - this allows time for the airbag to deploy while the driver/passenger are being forced forwards by the shock of the crash.