Anyone who characterizes airbag inflators knows the method is deceptively simple and unforgiving in the details. Fire the inflator into a sealed vessel of known volume, capture the pressure-time curve, and derive the metrics that decide whether a unit passes: peak tank pressure, rate of pressure rise, and time to peak. Every one of those numbers is only as trustworthy as the tank it was measured in. Volume uncertainty, thermal drift between shots, and inconsistent sealing all

Airbags have significantly contributed to road safety since their inception, and ongoing advancements are essential as vehicles transition towards higher levels of automation. This article examines the historical development of airbags, the methodologies employed in their testing, and their evolving role within the context of automated driving technology. Historical Development of Airbags Airbags were first introduced in the 1970s as a supplemental restraint system aimed at r

Occupant-safety testing produces two fundamentally different kinds of data, and the engineering answer almost always lives in the space between them. On one side is high-speed video — the deployment sequence, membrane kinematics, the moment a cushion contacts the fixture. On the other is time-series sensor data — tank pressure, load, displacement, acceleration. Look at either in isolation and you see half the picture. Correlate them on a common time base and you can tie a pre

Every airbag module program eventually runs into the same obstacle: the inflator itself. It is pyrotechnic, it varies unit to unit, it is expensive, it is consumed in a single shot, and you cannot turn it up or down to see what a design change actually does. For most of a development cycle, what an engineer really needs is not a live inflator at all — it is a repeatable, adjustable gas source that behaves like one. That is the Microsys Cold Gas System. An inflator you can pro

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In an occupant-safety lab, the hard part was never firing the device. It is everything that has to happen around the shot, in sync, every single time: the squib pulse, the high-speed cameras, the pressure and current channels, the lights, the interlocks, and the traceability record. Handle that manually across a rack of separate boxes and you inherit variability, slow cycles, and gaps in the data. SureFire 6, now in its sixth generation, exists to make all of it a single auto

A conformance-of-production line lives or dies on the test system at the end of it. When that system is the gate for releasing safety-critical airbag, inflator, or pretensioner parts, its condition is not a maintenance footnote — it is a production dependency. Microsys builds its service and support model around exactly that reality: not a warranty that runs out, but a long-term partnership designed to keep your system accurate, current, and running, wherever in the world it

Pyrotechnic pretensioners are not a single part. A test lab sees retractor-style and buckle-style units across a range of models and geometries, and each one has to be fired, restrained, and measured under conditions a regulator will accept. The awkward part is usually the fixture: rebuild it for every variant, and changeover time — not the test itself — becomes the bottleneck. The Microsys SureFire Seat Belt Pretensioner Test System is built to remove that bottleneck while k

As the snow blankets our beautiful landscapes, all of us at Microsys extend a warm, Canadian-style holiday greeting to you! We're filled...

We are all facing an unprecedented situation. The coronavirus pandemic is affecting all our lives, our families, our friends, our...

With dual stage airbag technology becoming more common, it is increasingly critical to ensure that the timing between firing the two ...

Why did the airbag you just fired reach full inflation later than you expected it to? Was it a defective airbag, or perhaps the cover, ...

An automated airbag test system provides for control over safety interlocks such as emergency stop switches, warning lights, warning buzzers, door sensors, electronic door locks and ventilation. Under control of the automated test system software, the safety interlocks ensure the safety of you and your operators. After all, while an airbag is intended to save lives during a collision, it is an explosive and potentially life threatening component that needs to be treated