Airbag Technology For Passive Supplemental Restraint

Airbag Description

Discuss about the Airbag Technology for Passive Supplemental Restraint.

Automotive airbag technology was developed to provide proper safety to drivers and passengers. Today's airbag system is a passive supplemental restraint that is used as pad for the drivers or passenger during frontal impacts. In today’s era this technology is smartly adaptive and will be used in future as well. The need of the tenants regarding the safety while driving as well as performing check of the entire sensor like out-of position sensing and child seat sensing disables the airbag whenever some misconception happens.

Airbag is a device used for vehicle safety and is designed to adapt to rapid changes during a collision. It prevents the event to cause harmful damage. It was invented by an engineer named as John Hetrick. He designed this technology with his experience regarding air compression in Navy. It was a valuable invention with very less economic expenditure. The invention was due to the inspiration to provide safety to the drivers. As there were rapid increase in the accidents rates and a law to provide automatic protection was launched. The federal government announced to improve the safety measures and this facility of air bag was introduced in the market. Air bag is a cushion which protects the automobile in case off collision. It consists of air bag module, monitoring system, sensors, indicator and steering connector. These elements are interconnected and functions at time of accident. The sensor visualize the scenario of car and whenever a massive collision occurs the sensor detects the impact and heats up the chamber to perform a fast chemical reaction. The reaction produces nitrogen gas that fills the air balloon within seconds. This bag covers the entire car and the nitrogen gas gets released as soon as bag is opened. Airbags were introduced to us to reduce fatality rates in vehicular crashes. Ever since its introduction into the car safety system, the number of fatalities and injuries a year have reduced and have dramatically decreased. The finesse of detail in the airbags technology is vital as it is the reason for the decreased injury and death rates. Thus it is widely used in the current era as it safeguards the life of people while travelling. There are certain situations in which accidents take place without any fault, so to avoid deaths and injuries in that case airbag technology is widely used.

Airbag History and Market Growth

It was issued on 18 August 1953 in United States (Ashley, 2015).  It was adopted in place of substitution of seat belts for safety purpose. It gained wide popularity in both local and global market as the efficiency of airbag was widely accepted as it safeguards the life during car crash. The boom in the market regarding airbags was due to the increase in awareness among consumer regarding vehicle safety features. The growth in automobile sector was due to the completion from other car manufacturing companies. The reason for significant growth in local and global market can be seen due to government legislations. Whenever the vehicle collides with a pedestrian or hits the bumper it would be inflated to provide a softer impact, much like an airbag in the steering wheel. While an inflatable bumper might invoke ideas of pedestrians bouncy off into the path of other vehicles, it was insisted that it would collapse during the impact to absorb the energy, much like the airbag mounted in steering wheels inside cars do (Bennett,  Rokas and Chen, 2017). After emerging of air bag market the old generic systems that were previously used are not currently available. In order to improve the functionally of the airbag during crashes, we must understand the fundamentals of an airbag. The purpose of an airbag is to provide the occupants with a soft cushion that lowers the impact on the passengers’ bodies upon contact. Therefore, the speed at which the airbags are release play an immense role. If the airbag isn’t released on time, it would be against its purpose of being available to the passengers as the impact would have already occurred. The airbag can also be dangerous to the passengers if they are seated to close as with the latest technology, airbags are deployed with milliseconds to ensure it is present before the body of the passenger hits any surface of the car due to the crash impact. This time can be even quicker if pre-impact sensors are installed onto the bodies of the car, so the airbags can be released millisecond before impact even occurs.

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The motivation for developing airbag is to help the customers sitting in the car to reduce collision injuries and making the car driving safe. It reduces the damage caused to the customers during injury. In last few years road accidents are taking place  frequently that is why introducing airbags were an emerging need in the market. A number of deaths were increasing and the reason was road accidents thus demand of safety raised in the market (van Ratingen,  2016). The living standards as increased and the willingness of customers to spend money globally increased the airbag market. Increasing purchases of luxury vehicles that have airbags protect people from injuries and death. Companies like Mercedes, Porsche, Audi, and Bentley have installed airbags in their cars so that passengers are protected at time of driving. We can introduce a sensor into the body of the car (Pradeep, et. al 2017). This sensor can detect the speed of the crash and deploy the airbag according to the intensity of the crash. With this system, the passenger will not get hit by the airbag at a high speed when he/she was involved in a low speed crash (Thomas, et. al, 2015).   Thus if a person drives fast it can be identified and stop an occurrence of risk by indicating some safety measures.

Airbag Functionality and Safety Improvements

The technology has changed the living standard as the riders need not to worry about the collision as they have the saviour which would be used to save at time of collision. While driving over highways the speed is often ignored which sometimes lead to severe accident that to save the life of all people sitting in the car airbags were generated. These are used to minimize the risk of injuries and deal in the rollover cases (Patrawala, Ghorpade and Gore, 2016). The use of airbags has protected a person in right circumstances. As research showed that many drivers used to drive without wearing seat belts thus an alternative was developed that is using airbag facility. The development of this technology has reduced the risk among small children’s as they don’t wear seat belts while travelling. Airbag gets activated in milliseconds so that person is safe as soon as some crash occurs (Kuk and Shkrum, 2017). The only motive for developing the concept of airbag was to reduce the death rates due to road accidents. Other than that while travelling for long distances driver might un-accidently take a nap, thus airbag act as a saviour in that situation. Airbags takes care of the entire situation on road by detecting the entire possible situation that may cause damage to the person.  If the car doesn’t have airbags it will increase the chances of injuries and will enhance the risk factor while travelling. It is true that there are certain levels of risk that can occur using airbags but the risk of death is much greater than getting injured by an airbag (Merkle and Harrigan, 2016). Hence, it is suggested that vehicle has airbag so that it doesn’t cause any damage.

Car crashes are unpredictable and can occur from any angle. Therefore, airbags are not only important in the frontal region but also from other angles. Having a higher number of airbags in a car doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be safer. Releasing all airbags without a crash can act as a higher detrimental to the passengers as the passenger could receive additional blows to their body that were not necessary in the situation (Hyman, et. al, 2016). An improvement in this area of safety would be a smart release system. Running crash patterns and speeds into algorithms and comparing them with the direction of impact taken by the passengers counteract these directions with the amount of force required from the airbags to maintain the safety of the passenger. These airbags should target specific body parts, too quickly restrain the passengers body from moving. For example, knee airbags or inflatable seatbelts, these suggestions would eliminate movement rapidly.

Airbag Benefits and Drawbacks

In short, airbags are yet to be fully revolutionized as there are several areas in which it can be improved to ensure a higher level of security for the cars passengers. Increasing the time of release by introducing sensors, counter-acting specific directions during crashes based on side of impact, alternating speeds of airbags on release are just several of many possibilities there are to improve the airbag technology system (Ashley, 2015). As for the existents of airbags, no other technology has been released to outshine to idea of airbags. Personally, an idea of releasing bumpers just before contact will be revolutionary but also expensive and very hard to perfect and will take decades to perfect the concept. Consequently, airbag technology system is going to be the dominant car safety technology for the decades to come.  Airbags were introduced for safety purpose and has been widely adopted in the market.

Conclusion

Airbag technology is a boom in the market that as covered the entire market and is a future technology for assuring vehicle safety systems. Although Mercedes has been working on this technology for several years, it isn't available on any production models yet and may not be seen on the road for another few years. With the current evolution of airbags and their pervasiveness within the automotive world, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine future cars using airbags to not only protect passengers, but to actually stop cars as well. 

References

Ashley, B., 2015. Defective Designs in Airbag Technology. In The Forum: A Tennessee Student Legal Journal (Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 4).

Bennett, J., Rokas, O. and Chen, L., 2017. Healthcare in the Smart Home: A Study of Past, Present and Future. Sustainability, 9(5), p.840.

Hyman, D.A., Saha, S., Nayar, H.S., Doyle, J.F., Agarwal, S.K. and Chaiet, S.R., 2016. Patterns of facial fractures and protective device use in motor vehicle collisions from 2007 to 2012. JAMA facial plastic surgery, 18(6), pp.455-461.

Kuk, M. and Shkrum, M.J., 2017. Injury Patterns Sustained in Fatal Motor Vehicle Collisions with Driver's Third?Generation Airbag Deployment. Journal of forensic sciences.

 Merkle, A.C. and Harrigan, T.P., 2016. Research Literature Review: The Use of Air Bags for Mitigating Grade Crossing and Trespass Accidents (No. DOT/FRA/ORD-16/22).

Patrawala, Y.I., Ghorpade, R.D. and Gore, R.G., 2016. Effectiveness of pedestrian safety technologies for the new age car: a review. International journal of current engineering and technology, 6(5), pp.1522-1531.

Pradeep, S.A., Iyer, R.K., Kazan, H. and Pilla, S., 2017. Automotive Applications of Plastics: Past, Present, and Future. In Applied Plastics Engineering Handbook (Second Edition) (pp. 651-673).

Thomas, S.D., Weiss, H.C. and Zawisa, K.M., GM Global Technology Operations LLC, 2015. Vehicle and an airbag assembly for the vehicle. U.S. Patent 9,114,776.

Van Ratingen, M.R., 2016. Saving Lives with Safer Cars: The Past, Present and Future of Consumer Safety Ratings. In Proceedings of the IRCOBI Conference.