on video Airbags | How do they work?

 

eng! 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.

Artwork: 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 original 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.

Like everything else in the world, because 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 passenger 

 

eng! 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.

Artwork: 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 original 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.

Like everything else in the world, because 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 passenger