Soft Impact: a Look at Airbag Safety

Few people know that the idea of the airbag - a soft buffer to impact against in a smash - has been around for decades. The first patent on an air bag for airplanes was submitted during World War II. During the 1980s, the first commercial airbags appeared in motorcars.

Right up to today, stats reveal that airbags cut the chance of dying in a straight frontal crash by around 30%. Now there are also door mounted side and seat-mounted airbags. In point of fact, some motorcars go far beyond merely having two air bags, and alternatively have 6 to 8 airbags.

The purpose of an air bag is to ease the passenger’s advanced movement as smoothly as possible in just a split second. An airbag can achieve this task in 3 steps:

• The airbag is made of a slim, nylon fabric that’s compressed inside the dashboard or steering wheel and, more recently, the door or seat
• The sensor is the device that tells the bag to balloon. Ballooning happens when there is a crash force equal to driving into a brick wall at 16 to 24 km per hour. A mechanical switch is flipped when there’s a mass shift that cuts off an electric contact, instructing the detectors that a crash has occurred. The sensors obtain data from an accelerometer that’s part of a microchip
• The bag’s inflation system combines sodium azide with potassium nitrate to produce nitrogen gas. Hot gusts of the nitrogen gas balloon the air bag

Due to the incredibly fast expansion of an airbag, it’s a safety requirement that the driver and passenger sit in the seat with a straight back providing a good distance between the steering wheel / dashboard and their face - this allows time for the bag to balloon while they are being pushed forwards by the shock of the crash.

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