Motorcycle Safety
Dainese, a leading motorcycle apparel manufacturer in Italy, has a new line of technical clothing that uses a proprietary D-Air Technolgy.
D-Air is 10 years in the making, having been thoroughly tested on the racetrack by the likes of World MotoGP Champion Valentino Rossi, and is described by Dainese as “intelligent.”
According to a Dainese spokesman, this means the apparel has “ability to protect the wearer, even without their intervention, when they are unable to control what is happening around them.
Intelligent clothing is technology you can wear thanks to the innovative integration of expertise from a variety of fields, including electronics, mechanical engineering and medicine.
Integration that’s made possible by another field of expertise–that of designing safety tailored to the human body.”
According to Dainese, D-Air detects dangerous situations and inflates airbags around the body to prevent indury on impact.
It uses an advanced triggering algorithm that enables the instructions to be executed without any physical connection to the motorcycle.
High-pressure airbags that wrap around the body inflate to provide uniform protection from impact.
The system works in with the existing body armor in professional racing leathers, shielding those areas of the rider’s body that need further protection, such as the shoulders and collarbones.
It is also designed to limits hyperextension and hyperflexion of the neck, as well as limiting excessive shoulder blade movement.
When inflated, the airbag stabilizes the body armor and back protector panels, holding everying in place and maximizing protective properties.
Dainese tells us that, “tests carried out in accordance with the current European standard for body armor show that D-air Racing cuts the energy transferred by over 90% compared with traditional composite body armor.”
D-Air Racing is designed for track use, and will activate when the sensors detect a loss of front wheel traction (front lowsides), loss of rear wheel traction (rear lowsides), or a rider thrown from bike as a result of rear wheel slide AND sudden recovery of traction (highsides).
D-Air Racing typically inflates in 30 milliseconds. In the most violent spills, such as high-speed highsides, it can reduce the trigger time to as little as 15 milliseconds.
At one point, a cable tether system had been tested, but Dainese tells us that it was abaondoned because “it’s very difficult to find an appropriate connecting point on racing bikes, Cable systems don’t trip if the rider is not separated from the motorbike, and irritating cable flutter at high speed.”
Multi-time World MotoGP Champion Valentino Rossi has used the system and had this to say after his violent crash at Mugello in 2010…
“It was an impressive fall. Aside from the leg injury, the day after I was surprised to notice that I did not have any bruises on my shoulders. Air-bag worked perfectly, it’s a great result considering that the suit maintains its comfort, I can’t feel it.”
