Airbags
by Chris Woodford. Last updated: May 15, 2011.
Bang! We think of explosions as terrible, dangerous things—but that's not always the case. Every day, explosions are helping to save people's lives. If you're unlucky enough to be involved in a car accident, a carefully controlled explosion will (hopefully) fire an airbag out from the dashboard, cushioning the impact and helping to reduce the damage to your body. Airbags are very simple but also amazingly clever, because they have to open up at over 300 km/h (200mph)—faster than a car can crash! Let's take a closer look at how they work.
Photo: Airbags save lives thanks to the selfless dedication of crash-test dummies, which have been a feature of car design since the very first dummy, Sierra Sam, made his first test drive in 1949. If we couldn't test new safety innovations with dummies, we'd never be able to deploy them in our cars for real. A typical crash-test dummy has over 130 different sensors packed inside. This dummy, whose name is "Adam," is even designed to sweat like a real person so researchers can test the climate conditions inside a car! Photo by Warren Gretz courtesy of US Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory (DOE/ NREL).
The trouble with momentum
Like everything else in the world, car crashes are controlled by the laws of physics—and, more specifically, the laws of motion. Anything that moves has mass (very loosely speaking, this means how much "stuff" an object contains and it's closely related to how heavy it feels) and velocity (loosely, this is the same thing as speed, but strictly it means speed in a certain direction). Anything that has mass and velocity has kinetic energy, and the heavier your car and the faster you're going, the more kinetic energy it has. That's fine until you suddenly want to stop—or until you crash into something. Then all the energy has to go somewhere. Even though cars are designed to crumple up and absorb impacts, their energy still poses a major risk to the driver and passengers.
The trouble is, people inside a moving car have mass and velocity too and, even if the car stops, they'll tend to keep on going. It's a basic law of physics (known as Newton's first law of motion, after brilliant English physicist Sir Isaac Newton who first stated it) that things that are moving tend to keep on moving until something (a force of some kind) stops them. Cars have had seatbelts for decades, but they're a fairly crude form of protection. The biggest problem is that they restrain only your body. Your head weighs a surprising 3-6kg (6-12lb)—as much as several bags of sugar— and isn't restrained at all. So even if your body is fastened tight, the same basic law of physics says your head will keep on going and smash into the steering wheel or the glass windscreen. That's where airbags come in.
Photo: Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) formulated three basic laws describing how forces work. Picture courtesy of US Library of Congress.
How airbags help
An airbag is more correctly known
as a supplementary restraint system (SRS) or supplementary
inflatable
restraint (SIR). The word "supplementary" here means that the
airbag is designed to help the seatbelts protect you rather than
replace them (relying on an airbag to protect you without fastening
your seatbelt is extremely dangerous).
The basic idea is that the airbag
inflates as soon as the car starts to slow down in an accident and
deflates as your head presses against it. That's important: if the bag
didn't
deflate, your head would just bounce back off it and you'd be no better
off.
