Thursday, August 19, 2010

Airbag

The First Car with Airbag

Buick Electra

History of Airbag

An American inventor, Dr. Allen S. Breed, then invented and developed a key component for automotive use. Breed Corporation then marketed this innovation first in 1967 to Chrysler. A similar "Auto-Ceptor" crash-restraint, developed by Eaton, Yale & Towne Inc. for Ford was soon offered as an automatic safety system in the USA. The Italian Eaton-Livia company offered a variant with localized air cushions.

The first patent on an inflatable crash-landing device for airplanes was filed during World War II. In the 1980s, the first commercial airbags appeared in automobiles. Since model year 1990, all new cars sold in the United States have been required to have airbags on both driver and passenger sides. To date, statistics show that airbags reduce the risk of dying in a direct frontal crash by about 30 percent. Today, some cars have six or even eight airbags.

How do Airbag works?

First, moving objects have momentum (the product of the mass and the velocity of an object). If no outside force acts on an object, the object will continue to move at its present speed and direction. Cars consist of several objects, including the vehicle itself, loose objects in the car and, of course, passengers. If these objects are not restrained, they will continue moving at whatever speed the car is traveling at, even if the car is stopped by a collision. Stopping an object's momentum requires force acting over a period of time. When a car crashes, the force required to stop an object is very great because the car's momentum has changed instantly while the passengers' has not(there is not much time to work with). The goal of any supplemental restraint system is to help stop the passenger while doing as little damage to him or her as possible. What an airbag wants to do is to slow the passenger's speed to zero with little or no damage. The constraints that it has to work within are huge. The airbag has the space between the passenger and the steering wheel or dashboard and a fraction of a second to work with. Even that tiny amount of space and time is valuable, however, if the system can slow the passenger evenly rather than forcing an abrupt halt to his or her motion.

In 2006 the airbag was set up for a motorcycle. This was in the Gold Wing by Honda.

Honda Gold Wing



Working of Airbag {Picturised}

Before Dashing


15 milliseconds after Dashing



 
 
After 30 milliseconds the Airbag will shrink
 


0 comments:

Post a Comment