ABS Brakes

The idea of ABS brakes

Anti- locking braking system or ABS brakes are designed to prevent accidents not help you when your in an accident. The purpose of ABS, is to avoid crashes in the first place. ABS help do this by reducing the stopping distance of the car, ABS brakes will stop you faster than conventional brakes will. The name is pretty self explanatory ABS brakes stop the tyres from locking up- which is when cars begin to side on the road. By preventing the locking of the wheels you can over come the loss of traction which is quite dangerous in an accident because if you dont have traction on the road you cannot steer your car. So with ABS brakes you can brake and turn at the same time which reduces the chances of a crash.

Components of ABS brakes

There are four main components to an ABS system:

Speed sensors Pump Valves Controller

Speed Sensors- The anti-lock braking system needs some way of knowing when a wheel is about to lock up. The speed sensors, which are located at each wheel, or in some cases in the differential, provide this information. Valves - There is a valve in the brake line of each brake controlled by the ABS. On some systems, the valve has three positions:

In position one, the valve is open; pressure from the master cylinder is passed right through to the brake. In position two, the valve blocks the line, isolating that brake from the master cylinder. This prevents the pressure from rising further should the driver push the brake pedal harder. In position three, the valve releases some of the pressure from the brake.

Pump- Since the valve is able to release pressure from the brakes, there has to be some way to put that pressure back. That is what the pump does; when a valve reduces the pressure in a line, the pump is there to get the pressure back up. Controller- The controller is a computer in the car. It watches the speed sensors and controls the valves.

How ABS brakes work

The controller monitors the speed sensors at all times. It is looking for decelerations in the wheel that are out of the ordinary. Right before a wheel locks up, it will experience a rapid deceleration. If left unchecked, the wheel would stop much more quickly than any car could. It might take a car five seconds to stop from 97 km/h under ideal conditions, but a wheel that locks up could stop spinning in less than a second. The ABS controller knows that such a rapid deceleration is impossible, so it reduces the pressure to that brake until it sees an acceleration, then it increases the pressure until it

sees the deceleration again. It can do this very quickly, before the tyre can actually significantly change speed. The result is that the tyre slows down at the same rate as the car, with the brakes keeping the tyres very near the point at which they will start to lock up. This gives the system maximum braking power. When the ABS system is in operation you will feel a pulsing in the brake pedal; this comes from the rapid opening and closing of the valves. Some ABS systems can cycle up to 15 times per second.

Summary
ABS brakes are designed to prevent wheels from locking up and provide the shortest stopping distance on slippery surfaces. They also help you keep control of your car when you are braking heavily by making sure you dont loss traction with the road. ABS brakes work by sensing when the wheel is about to lock up and reducing the braking pressure on that wheel then reapplying the pressure again very rapidly so that the wheel never locks up and you have constant control when stopping your car. ABS brakes are a preventive device and do not help you when you actually come into contact with something.

Seat belts
The idea of seat belts
The basic idea of a seatbelt is very simple: It keeps you from flying through the windshield or hurdling toward the dashboard when your car comes to an abrupt stop. But why would this happen in the first place? In short, because of inertia. Inertia is an object's tendency to keep moving until something else works against this motion. To put it another way, inertia is every object's resistance to changing its speed and direction of travel. Things naturally want to keep going. If a car is speeding along at 100 kilometres per hour, inertia wants to keep it going 100 km/h in one direction. Air resistance and friction with the road are constantly slowing it down, but the engine's power compensates for this energy loss. Anything that is in the car, including the driver and passengers, has its own inertia, which is separate from the car's inertia. The car accelerates riders to its speed. Imagine that you're coasting at a steady100km/h. Your speed and the car's speed are pretty much equal, so you feel like you and the car are moving as a single unit. But if the car were to crash into a telephone pole, it would be obvious that your inertia and the car's were absolutely independent. The force of the pole would bring the car to an abrupt stop, but your speed would remain the same. Without a seatbelt, you would either slam into the steering wheel at 100km/h or go flying through the windshield at that same speed. Just as the pole slowed the car down, the dashboard, windshield or the road would slow you down by exerting a tremendous amount of force. It is a given that no matter what happens in a crash, something would have to exert force on you to slow you down. But depending on where and how the force is applied, you might be killed instantly or you might walk away from the accident unhurt.

If you hit the windshield with your head, the stopping power is concentrated on one of the most vulnerable parts of your body. It also stops you very quickly, since the glass is a hard surface. This can easily kill or severely injure a person. A seatbelt applies the stopping force to more durable parts of the body over a longer period of time. A seatbelt's job is to spread the stopping force across sturdier parts of your body in order to minimize damage. A typical seatbelt consists of a lap belt, which rests over your pelvis, and a shoulder belt, which extends across your chest. The two belt sections are tightly secured to the frame of the car in order to hold passengers in their seats. When the belt is worn correctly, it will apply most of the stopping force to the rib cage and the pelvis, which are relatively sturdy parts of the body. Since the belts extend across a wide section of your body, the force isn't concentrated in a small area, so it can't do as much damage. Additionally, the seatbelt webbing is made of more flexible material than the dashboard or windshield. It stretches a little bit, which means the stop isn't quite so abrupt. The seatbelt shouldn't give more than a little, however, or you might bang into the steering wheel or side window. Safe seatbelts will only let you shift forward slightly.

Components of seat belts

Most seat belts have the following components:

Retractor mechanism Pretensioner Load limiter

Retractor mechanism- the seat belt webbing is connected to a retractor mechanism. The central element in the retractor is a spool, which is attached to one end of the webbing. Inside the retractor, a spring applies a rotation force, to the spool. This works to rotate the spool so it winds up any loose webbing. This is why your seat belt is tight fitting and isnt loose. This also allows you to pull some seat belt out if you want to lean forward or get in a more comfitable position. How ever you cant always pull out seat belt as you may have noticed when driving on a bumpy road or when you try and snatch the seat beat out quickly, this is because if your in a crash you dont want the seat belt to just come out you want it to hold you in position in the seat so car manufactures have designed a locking mechanism on you on your retractor system. This locking mechanism stops your seat belt coming out when your in a collision. Locking mechanisms can be activated in two ways: 1. Triggered by the cars movement. For example if the car decelerates quickly like when your involved in a accident the seat belt will lock up and hold you in position. 2. Triggered by the belt movement. For example if the seat belt is jerked like it would be in an accident it locks up and also holds you in position in your seat. Pretensioner The pretensioner winds up any slack in your seat beat so that you dont fly forward into the seat beat causing damage to your body. For a seat belt to be really effective it needs to be against your body at all time and tight. And this is what the pretensioner does it pulls on the seat belt so that there isnt any slack. The force

that the pretensioner applies to the body helps move the passenger into the optimum crash position in there seat. Load limiters- When a car collides with an obstacle at extremely high speed, a seatbelt can inflict serious damage. As a passenger's inertial speed increases, it takes a greater force to bring the passenger to a stop. In other words, the faster you're going on impact, the harder the seatbelt will push on you. Some seatbelt systems use load limiters to minimize belt-inflicted injury. The basic idea of a load limiter is to release a little more excess belt webbing when a great deal of force is applied to the belt. The simplest load limiter is a fold sewn into the belt webbing. The stitches holding the fold in place are designed to break when a certain amount of force is applied to the belt. When the stitches come apart, the webbing unfolds, allowing the belt to extend a little bit more. This increases stopping distance and therefore reduces the force acting on your body lowering the damage done to your body.

Summary
Seat belts are designed as a safety measure when youre in an accident. They are meant to reduce the chance of injury when youre involved in a crash. They do this by distributing the force of a crash onto the stronger parts of your body (chest and pelvis) they also increase your stopping distance slightly by the stretch of the seat belt material, which helps reduce the force applied on your body. The seat belt holds you in your seat so that when coming to a sudden stop your not thrown against the windscreen or against the steering wheel, which would cause a great deal more damage then being held in place be your seat belt. Seat belts also stop you from becoming missiles when you have a collision they stop you being thrown from the car which will cause injury both by flying through the windscreen and hitting the ground or other solid object when you land. Force= mass x acceleration, so if you can lower your acceleration than you can lower the force that is being applied to your body therefore reducing some of the damage done on your body, this is what a seat belt does in very basic terms. Seat beats also spread the force over a larger area of your body so that you have more surface area to absorb the force as well as applying the force to an area of your body which is most suited to absorbing the shock of an accident (the chest and pelvis).

Air bags

The idea of air bags

Air bags are designed to cushion you from the harder parts of the car like the steering wheel and dash board. They act in the same way as mats do for gymnasts breaking their fall and increasing stopping distance and time. They act as a safe barrier between the passenger and the hard unforgiving car interior. 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 restraint system is to help stop the passenger while doing as little damage to him or her as possible. What an air bag 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 air bag has the space between the passenger and the steering wheel or dash board 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. Then it saves lives.

Components of air bags

There are three parts to an air bag that help to accomplish this feat:

The bag itself is made of a thin, nylon fabric, which is folded into the steering wheel or dashboard or, more recently, the seat or door. The sensor is the device that tells the bag to inflate. Inflation happens when there is a collision force equal to running into a brick wall at 16 to 24 km per hour. A mechanical switch is flipped when there is a mass shift that closes an electrical contact, telling the sensors that a crash has occurred. The sensors receive information from an accelerometer built into a microchip. The air bag's inflation system reacts sodium azide (NaN3) with potassium nitrate (KNO3) to produce nitrogen gas. Hot blasts of the nitrogen inflate the air bag.

The air bag system ignites a solid propellant, which burns extremely rapidly to create a large volume of gas to inflate the bag. The bag then literally bursts from its storage site at up to 322 km/h in the blink of an eye! A second later, the gas quickly dissipates through tiny holes in the bag, thus deflating the bag so you can move. Because if you were up against a solid bag and your seat you would get hurt a lot more than if you are against a nice soft bag and you seat. The holes are also there so that you dont bounce off the bag and cause whip lash.

How air bags work

Inside your steering wheel or dash board you have a air bag unit like shown above and when the unit senses a shock it burns a propellent which causes gas to expand which blows up your air bag. This all happens in the blink of an eye. Then as you come forward onto the bag the bag released air so you slowly move forward until you are almost stopped then the bad runs out of gas. This helps you by increasing stopping distance and time and applying the force over large area this increases your chances of survival in car crashes. This is what happens when an air bag is deployed in a crash

In the 15 to 20 milliseconds after impact, the crash sensors and control unit determine the severity of the collision and decide whether to deploy the airbag. At about 25 milliseconds, the airbag splits its covering pad in predetermined places and begins to inflate rapidly. At about 45 milliseconds, the bag is fully inflated while the seat belted occupant is still moving forward. At around 60 milliseconds, the occupant contacts the airbag, which immediately begins to deflate via vent holes in the back. Up to 100 milliseconds, the occupant continues to sink deeply into the airbag, which cushions the head and chest while it is deflating.

Summary
Air bags save lives by acting as a soft barrier between yourself and the hard car interior. Air bags also increase stopping distance and reduce momentum slowly and safely. This reduces a sudden force on your body which can be fatal.

Crumple zones
The idea of crumple zones
To understand how crumple zones affect passengers, consider a car crashing head-on into a stationary concrete wall. Before the crash, the car and its passengers move together at the same speed. If the car has a rigid body, an impact will cause both the car and passengers to come to a stop in a split second. It is this rapid deceleration that causes injuries and fatalities in a car crash. The force acting on the passengers is given by Newton's 2nd law:

As the stopping time is only a split second, the force on the passengers is very high. Cars with crumple zones, however, do not have a rigid body. One can think of them as springs being compressed against a wall. Although the front bumper of the car immediately becomes stationary, it takes some time for the metal work to collapse. This allows the middle and rear of the car to continue in motion for a short time. Since the stopping time is increased, the force acting on the passengers is greatly reduced. By absorbing part of the impact from a car crash, crumple zones have been credited with saving thousands of lives each year. Nearly all cars sold today have front and rear crumple zones.

How Crumple Zones Work

Crumple zones are deliberate weak spots that engineers have placed in the structure of a car. While this might appear contrary to passenger safety, there are sound principles behind this approach. By placing the weak spots in strategic locations, the metal work of a car can be made to

collapse in a controlled manner. This creates 2 mechanisms by which the energy from an impact can be managed: 1. in deforming the metal work of the car, energy from the impact gets "used up" or converted into heat. This reduces the amount of energy left to damage the passenger area. 2. since the collapse is controlled, energy from the impact can be directed away from the passenger area. In most designs, force from the impact is channelled to areas such as the floor, bulkhead, sills, roof and bonnet.

Summary
Automotive Engineers have designed the body parts of a vehicle to crumple in predetermined patterns to absorb the energy from a crash's impact and maintain the integrity of the passenger compartment, keeping the driver and passengers safer.