Citation

Accid. Reconstr. J. 2012; 22(3): 21-27.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Accident Reconstruction Journal)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In order to improve the crashworthiness of cargo tank motor vehicles that carry hazardous materials, this study investigates the effects of a rollover crash on the rollover protection devices on the tops of these vehicles. Full-scale experiments were conducted to quantify the pre-impact dynamics of rollover crashes of loaded cargo tank motor vehicles and compared with the results of dynamic simulations conducted in a previous study. A small single-unit cargo tank vehicle was fitted with a roll cage so that it could withstand a crash, and it was rolled over four times. A cargo tank semitrailer was rolled over once. The five maneuvers leading to the rollovers were selected to approximate maneuvers that had been simulated in the earlier study. This provided a diverse set of rollover conditions and allowed comparison of the experimental to the simulated results. Vehicle motion was recorded by an onboard inertial navigation system combined with a global positioning system receiver. The crashes were recorded by video cameras from several angles on the ground and, in most cases, by one or more cameras on the vehicle. The semitrailer was instrumented with strain gages and string potentiometers to measure the deflections of the tank and the rollover protection devices during impact. The velocity measurements in this study can provide quantitative guidance concerning the performance requirements of rollover protection devices. The measurements of the semitrailer deformation will serve as a case study of how the particular design of rollover protective devices performed during a crash of known conditions. The experimentally measured roll rates at the moment of impact were within the range of those calculated during the simulations. A comparison of the experimentally measured values with the results of the dynamic simulations corroborated the simulations' order of magnitude.