Applying TRIZ to Develop New Designs for the Future of the Airbag

TRIZ is the acronym for the Russian phrase “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.” It is based on research that analyzed over 2 million world-wide patents, to extract the principles of innovation and creativity that made the most “creative” patents work.

A fundamental principle of TRIZ is the elimination of the engineering trade-offs that are common in design of all systems. For the airbag, this means finding new design concepts that eliminate the trade-offs between high and low deployment threshold, between high acceleration and de-powered inflation, between protecting safety belted occupants and protecting all occupants, between increasing the complexity of the sensor system and reducing the reliability. Three new classes of airbag design are shown, and 48 additional concepts are described, to demonstrate the application of the TRIZ methodology.