Health Upgraders

It’s a little known fact that airbags are not a recent idea, and some may be astounded to realise the design has been around for over sixty years. The very first patent on an airbag for airplanes was registered during World War 2. During the 80s, the very first commercial airbags were a safety feature in automobiles.

Up to the present day, stats reveal that air bags cut the chance of death in a direct anterior crash by as much as thirty percent. These days there are also seat mounted and door mounted side airbags. Incredibly, some motorcars go far beyond simply having two airbags, and alternatively have 6 to 8 airbags.

An airbag’s goal is to ease the forward motion of the driver in only a split second. There are 3 parts to an airbag that help execute this feat:

• The bag is composed of a thin, nylon that’s packed inside the steering wheel or dashboard and, these days, the door or seat
• The detector is the device that tells the airbag to balloon. Inflation occurs when there’s a crash force equal to motoring into a brick wall at 16 to 24 km per hour. A mechanical switch is flipped when there’s a mass movement that cuts off an electrical contact, telling the sensors that a crash has occurred. The sensors obtain information from an accelerometer built into a microprocessor chip
• The airbag’s inflation facility combines sodium azide (NaN3) with potassium nitrate (KNO3) to make nitrogen gas. Hot gusts of the nitrogen gas balloon the airbag

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 reasonable distance between the steering wheel / dashboard and their face – this provides time for the bag to deploy while the passenger/driver are being thrust forward by the affect of the smash.