Refine Your Search

Search Results

Author:
Technical Paper

Updating Generic Crush Stiffness Coefficients for Accident Reconstruction

2010-09-30
2010-01-1581
Often, the accident reconstructionist will find that there is no crash test data for a particular vehicle, making a direct calculation of the crush stiffness coefficients impossible without performing an actual crash test. A faster and more cost effective solution is to use “generic” crush stiffness coefficients that relate similar already tested vehicles to the incident vehicle. One previously published article that has been used for this purpose is; “Updating the Vehicle Class Categories” by Siddall and Day [ 9 ]. However, this paper, along with Hargens and Day's earlier paper, “Vehicle Data Sources for Accident Reconstruction” [ 3 ], are now somewhat outdated by newer model vehicles. New generic crush stiffness coefficient values were calculated to better represent newer vehicles produced between 1990-1999 and 2000-2009. The same eleven vehicle classifications used in this article were obtained from the above cited paper.
X