Citation

Zou D, Zhang X, Li Z, Sun J, Zhang J, Huang P, Ma K, Chen Y. J. Forensic Leg. Med. 2019; 65: 15-21.

Affiliation

Shanghai Key Laboratory of Forensic Medicine, Academy of Forensic Science, Ministry of Justice, PR China, 1347# West Guangfu Road, Shanghai, China. Electronic address: yijiuchen@gmail.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jflm.2019.04.006

PMID

31029002

Abstract

In dealing with a scooter-related traffic accident with rider death, it is necessary to identify the driver responsible for the accident. This study aimed to reconstruct the kinematics of a scooter-microvan accident involving three riders and explored the differences in injury risks and characteristics of the scooter driver and passengers. We reconstructed a real accident by using MADYMO multi-body simulation software. Moreover, we designed two-variable simulation experiments to analyze how the velocity and impact angle of the microvan are related to the injuries of the three riders. When the microvan speed is set at 18 km/h and that of the scooter is set at 28.8 km/h, the simulated kinematics correlates well with real accident data, and the impact positions and injury parameters correlate well with the actual injuries. When the impact angle is smaller than 30° and the microvan impact velocity is lower than 40 km/h, the head injury of the driver is more life-threatening than the corresponding injuries of the rear passengers. When the impact angle is 15° and the microvan impact velocity is in the range of 0-20 km/h, the femur fracture risk is higher for the driver than for passengers. As the impact angle increases to 45°, passengers have a higher risk of femur fracture than the driver in the velocity range of 0-10 km/h. This impact velocity range becomes 0-30 km/h at an impact angle of 60° and then 40-70 km/h at an impact angle of 90°. Our study shows that the multibody method can reconstruct accidents and predict the different injury features and risks between the driver and passengers, which is useful in identifying the driver.

Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd and Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Accident reconstruction; Forensic injury biomechanics; Injury risks; Scooter rider injury features; Scooter–microvan accident