Citation

Deyerl E, Cheng L. Accid. Reconstr. J. 2007; 17(4): 33-45.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, Accident Reconstruction Journal)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper presents and examines the use of computer simulation to analyze motorcycle-into-vehicle collisions. The software program EDSMAC4 within the HVE-2D suite, developed for simulation of vehicle-to-vehicle collisions, is extended in this work to the analysis of collisions between motorcycles and other vehicles. Simulation results are compared to results of the series of full-scale staged collisions between motorcycles and passenger vehicles published in an earlier SAE paper, 2002-01-0551, entitled "Seventeen Motorcycle Crash Tests Into Vehicles and a Barrier," by Adamson et al. The rest positions, damage ranges, and speed changes of the test vehicles in the simulations and those in the full-scale tests are presented in numerical and graphical formats. This effort achieved good to excellent correlation between simulated and test results, thereby providing support for the use of this simulation technique for the type of motorcycle-vehicle collisions examined in this study. In the set of 10 crash tests analyzed, 10 motorcycles moving at speeds between 25 and 49 miles/hour were guided into 2 stopped passenger vehicles. The simulations of these full-scale tests calculated the rest locations of the test automobiles to within approximately 1 foot or less in 7 of 10 tests, the changes in the automobile headings to within 4 degrees in all 10 tests, the automobiles' speed changes to within 2-1/2 miles/hour in 8 of 10 tests, the motorcycle speed changes to within 3 miles/hour in 7 of 10 tests, and the average automobile damage depths to within 2 inches in 7 of the 10 tests.