Technical Paper
Addition of Tire Forces into Low-speed Bumper-to-Bumper Crash Reconstruction Simulation Models
2024-04-09
2024-01-2479
Reconstruction of inline crashes between vehicles with a low closing speed, so-called “low speed” crashes, continues to be a class of vehicle collisions that reconstructionists require specific methods to handle. In general, these collisions tend to be difficult to reconstruct due primarily to the lack of, or limited amount of, physical evidence available after the crash. Traditional reconstruction methods such as impulse-momentum (non-residual damage based) and CRASH3 (residual damage based) both are formulated without considering tire forces of the vehicles. These forces can be important in this class of collisions. An alternative stiffness-based method for low closing speed crashes has been developed [1]. This method characterizes the stiffness of vehicle pairs using data from tests with exemplars of the subject vehicles. As currently formulated, the method does not include the effects of tire forces.