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Automotive occupant safety continues to evolve. At present this area has gathered a strong consumer interest which the vehicle manufacturers are tapping into with the introduction of many new safety technologies. Initially, individual passive devices and features such as seatbelts, knee- bolsters, structural crush zones, airbags etc., were developed for to help save lives and minimize injuries in accidents. Over the years, preventive measures such as improving visibility, headlights, windshield wipers, tire traction etc., were deployed to help reduce the probability of getting into an accident. With tremendous new research and improvements in electronics, we are at the stage of helping to actively avoid accidents in certain situations as well as providing increased protection to vehicle occupants and pedestrians.

In this work, we focused on the trip-over type, which occurs most frequently, and performed simulations to reproduce real-world rollover accidents by combining PC-Crash and FEA. At first, using a simplified full car model, sufficient conditions, such as additional velocity, required for a curb trip-over accident to occur, were derived from energy balance concept based on the same principle as critical sliding velocity (CSV) criterion. ...Based on rigid body dynamics, PC-Crash software was chosen to make an accident reconstruction analysis of some selected cases chosen from an accident database (NASS-CDS). ...The output of this PC-crash simulation was then used as the initial input conditions (i.e., speed, deceleration, etc.) of a detailed finite element analysis.

In this work, we focused on the trip-over type, which occurs most frequently, and performed simulations to reproduce real-world rollover accidents by combining PC-Crash and FEA. Soil trip-over simulation was carried out based on real world accidents. Based on rigid body dynamics, PC-Crash software was chosen to make an accident reconstruction analysis of some selected cases chosen from an accident database (NASS-CDS). ...Based on rigid body dynamics, PC-Crash software was chosen to make an accident reconstruction analysis of some selected cases chosen from an accident database (NASS-CDS). ...The output of this PC-crash simulation was then used as the initial input conditions (i.e., speed, deceleration, etc.) of a detailed finite element analysis.

During recent years the accident simulation program PCCRASH was developed, which allows to simulate the vehicles movement before, during and after the impact. ...Within SAE 1999-01-0444 a new coupling interface of PC-CRASH and the software MADYMO, developed by TNO in the Netherlands was published. During last year's publication only few validation cases, mainly related to rear end impacts could be demonstrated. ...One major emphasis was set on the influence of the crash pulse, which cannot be derived in PC-CRASH. In this way the paper demonstrates the possibilities as well as the limitations of the numerical model.