Safety continues to be one of the most important factors in motor vehicle design, manufacturing, and marketing. This course provides a comprehensive overview of these critical automotive safety considerations: injury and anatomy; human tolerance and biomechanics; occupant protection; testing; and federal legislation. The knowledge shared at this course enables participants to be more aware of safety considerations and to better understand and interact with safety experts. This course has been approved by the Accreditation Commission for Traffic Accident Reconstruction (ACTAR) for 18 Continuing Education Units (CEUs).
This title includes the technical papers developed for the 2023 Stapp Car Crash Conference, the premier forum for the presentation of research in impact biomechanics, human injury tolerance, and related fields, advancing the knowledge of land-vehicle crash injury protection. The conference provides an opportunity to participate in open discussion about the causes and mechanisms of injury, experimental methods and tools for use in impact biomechanics research, and the development of new concepts for reducing injuries and fatalities in automobile crashes.
This class will provide the student with the skills, knowledge, and abilities to interpret, analyze and apply HVEDR data in real-world applications. This course has been designed to build on the concepts presented in the SAE course Accessing and Interpreting Heavy Vehicle Event Data Recorders (ID# C1022). Advanced topics will include associating HVEDR data with collision events through timestamps, odometer logs, and data signatures, validating HVEDR speed data using specified vehicle parameters, performing time and distance analyses using HVEDR data, and correlating HVEDR data to physical evidence from the vehicle and roadway.
For automotive engineers involved in crash reconstruction and analysis, a knowledge of basic accident reconstruction principles and techniques is essential, but often insufficient to answer all of the questions posed by design engineers, regulators, and lawyers. This course takes participants beyond the basics of accident reconstruction to physical models and analysis techniques that are unique to the reconstruction of single-vehicle rollover crashes.
Many technical projects, most vehicle and component testing, and all accident reconstructions, product failure analyses, and other forensic investigations, require photographic documentation. Roadway evidence disappears, tested or wrecked vehicles are repaired, disassembled, or scrapped, and components can be tested for failure. Photographs are frequently the only evidence that remains of a wreck, or the only records of subjects before or during tests. Making consistently good images during any inspection is a critical part of the evaluation process.
Photographs and video recordings of vehicle crashes and accident sites are more prevalent than ever, with dash mounted cameras, surveillance footage, and personal cell phones now ubiquitous. The information contained in these pictures and videos provide critical information to understanding how crashes occurred, and analyze physical evidence. This course teaches the theory and techniques for getting the most out of digital media, including correctly processing raw video and photographs, correcting for lens distortion, and using photogrammetric techniques to convert the information in digital media to usable scaled three-dimensional data.
EDR's were first installed in 1994 and are now installed in 99% of new light vehicles sold in the US. In the US EDR’s are not required, but vehicles with EDR’s made after 9/1/2012 must meet minimum standardized content requirements of 49 CFR, Part 563 including speed, throttle, brake on/off and Delta V. Data must be retrievable with a publicly available tool. Only a few manufacturers install EDR’s worldwide currently, but the EU and China are adopting regulations to require them in the next few years.
The on-board emergency call system with accurate occupant injury prediction can help rescuers deliver more targeted rescue in traffic accident to save more lives. We used machine learning methods to establish, train, and validate a number of models that can predict occupant injuries (by MAIS level) based on 2800 two-vehicle collision accident cases from NHTSA CISS traffic accident database, and ranked the correlation of the factors affecting vehicle occupant injury levels in accidents.
Gouges and scratches to steel rollover protection structures are informative to the reconstruction and analysis of real-world vehicle rollover crashes. Variations in ground surface composition can be correlated with accompanying witness marks on the vehicle. This paper presents the results of nine full scale rollover protection structure tests using a variety of test speeds and surface compositions. The test results and graphical analyses that follow are displayed for use in comparison to similar subject crashes. In addition, impact of steel rollover protection structures with various opposing ground surface materials can produce visible sparks in low light conditions. Tests are presented to show the ability of these structures to produce sparks in a variety of surface impacts.
There is little literature on occupant kinematics during chain reaction motor vehicle collisions. It is not established if and/or when a chain-collision transitions from serial, discrete collisions into a combined collision. Bumper cars have been used as a model to understand occupant response to external forces in events of low injury potential. A series of chain-collisions and component impact tests were performed using a bumper car ride at a local amusement park. The test series consisted of rear impacts into an occupied target vehicle from a driven bullet vehicle; frontal impacts into a perimeter barrier (wall); chain-collisions consisting of a driven bullet vehicle striking an occupied primary target vehicle, which then collided with a non-occupied secondary target vehicle; and chain-collisions consisting of a driven bullet vehicle striking an occupied primary target vehicle which then collided with a wall. Time between collisions was adjusted via spacing.
This work aims to perform the optimization of the iron-aluminum lightweight body frame of a commercial electric bus orienting the static performance (e.g., strength and stiffness), side impact safety, and possible reduction in mass. Firstly, both he static and side impact finite element (FE) models are established for the electric bus body frame. The body frame is partitioned according to the deformation relationship and thickness of the square tube beams, and the contribution degree is analyzed by the relative sensitivity and the Sobol index method. The thickness of the tube beams in the nine regions is selected as the optimization design variables. After data sampling by the Hamersley method and conducting design of experiments, the surrogate model for optimization is fitted and built by the least square method.
Shadow positions can be useful in determining the time of day that a photograph was taken and determining the position, size, and orientation of an object casting a shadow in a scene. Astronomical equations can predict the location of the sun relative to the earth, and therefore the position of shadows cast by objects, based on the location’s latitude and longitude as well as the date and time of the incident. 3D computer softwares have begun to include these calculations as a part of their built in sun systems. In this paper, the authors examine the sun system in the 3D modeling software Blender to determine its reliability for accident reconstruction. Multiple environments in different latitudes, longitudes, and elevations in the United States of America were scanned using Faro LiDAR scanners to create pointclouds of the environments. A camera was then set up at each environment and pictures were taken at various times throughout the day from the same location in each environment.
This study describes and validates the single-track vehicle driver model used in newer versions of PC-Crash simulation software. This model eliminated several limitations that PC-Crash previously had for simulating motorcycle dynamics. Within PC-Crash, a path can be established for a motorcycle to follow. The software will generate the steering inputs and resulting motorcycle lean (roll) needed to follow the user defined path (within the limits of friction and stability) at the prescribed speed, braking, or acceleration levels. For the current study, this model was subjected to several validation tests. First, the model was examined for a simple scenario in which a motorcycle traversed a pre-defined curve at several speeds. This test resulted in the conclusion that the single-track driver model yielded motorcycle lean angles consistent with the standard, simple lean angle formula widely available in the literature.
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.