Sony Filed New Patent on Liquid Airbag Shock Protection

Sony has recently filed a patent on method of protecting hard drive by using liquid airbag technology. This innovation is suitable for any vibration sensitive electronics devices by just “wrapping” it with liquid airbag and thus protecting it from hard crashing.


You may have heard similar innovation before and that is true. In fact this has been refined from previous version to react ‘smarter’ to protect the electronics in better way. Previous version is claimed to not able to provide sufficient absorption especially when dealing with heavy shock.

You can imagine it as you have the electronics devices wrapped in a liquid protection bag. Whenever there is a vibration shock or drop, the liquid bag will act as a cushion preventing it from crashing with the outer casing. And this improved version will have additional biasing units embedded in the fluid filled airbag which keep the electronics devices well with proper surrounding protection. On top of that, there will be irises mechanism built in that could detect heavy shock and thus impose more protection on the impacted portions.

The idea seems to be simple but the implementation could be tough especially when dealing with liquid and sensor on how to detect heavy impact from different direction. Since the fluid is being used during the protection, some hope to see it to be combined with cooling mechanism for proper heat dissipation.