How can airbags be improved

As good as the pillows of safety are at doing their job, there is always room for improvement. Such is the case with a patent approval that Waymo recently received. According to our friends at Autoevolution, the approval is for an airbag that creates an enclosure. The idea is to protect the rider from all directions.

The idea of updating or improving airbags not new. Sandy Munro, from Munro and Associates, is looking at the effectiveness of new seat-belt deployed airbags. If the product works as expected, it could initially be used in autocycles before being rolled out into other vehicles.

In an interview with Malcolm Bricklin, he discusses, and shows, how the seat-belt deployed air sacks would work. The video clip of the interview is below. The discussion begins at the timestamp. In the meantime, further development of the frontal airbags continues. For example, Acura just is launching a new type geared for the passenger. Crash into a tree. The car was traveling only 35 miles per hour There is one other important thing to estimate, the distance from the driver to the steering wheel.

I'll be generous and put this at a value of 0. Here is what happens. The human is traveling at The air bag has to deploy before the human collides with the stopped steering wheel. Now for some physics.

If we assume no forces on the human forget about the seatbelt for now , the human will have a constant velocity. With this constant velocity, we can calculate the time to impact using just the definition of average velocity in one dimension:. Using the values of That is a super short time—like the blink of an eye. OK, actually it is less than the " blink of an eye " which seems to take around 0. But wait! It's even worse. This calculated time is how long it would take for the human to hit the steering wheel.

But the idea is to have the human hit an airbag instead. That means that not only does the airbag have to inflate in this time, but it also decreases the distance the person can travel. Let's say the distance is cut in half—that also cuts the inflation time in half to about 0.

BMW engineers have chosen door-mounted airbags. The door has more space, allowing for a bigger bag that provides more coverage. The head airbag , or Inflatable Tubular Structure ITS , looks a little like a big sausage and, unlike other airbags, is designed to stay inflated for about five seconds to offer protection against second or third impacts. Working with the side airbag, the ITS is supposed to offer better protection in some side collisions.

Another option for head protection in side impacts is the curtain airbag. All of this makes it pretty clear that the science of airbags is still new and under rapid development.

You can expect many advances in this field as designers come up with new ideas and learn from real-world crash data. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close.

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