Journal Article
Occupant Trajectory Model using Case-Specific Accident Reconstruction Data for Vehicle Position, Roll, and Yaw
2008-04-14
2008-01-0517
In the fields of accident reconstruction and injury biomechanics, it is often of interest to know details of an occupant's ejection from a vehicle during a rollover. Current occupant trajectory models do not account for vehicle yaw and yaw rate. Such considerations are compulsory if the occupant's rest point has a non-trivial deviation from the vehicle's roll path. Moreover, many existing models use a single, generic function for the roll rate for all analyses. Such approaches intrinsically model all rollovers as identical events, regardless of the underlying uniqueness a particular accident may exhibit. The objective of this work is to model the trajectory of an occupant ejected from a vehicle in a rollover event. In particular, we model the vehicle's longitude, latitude, roll, yaw, and time derivatives thereof, based on data extracted from a particular accident reconstruction. We model the occupant moving in the vehicle and possibly ejected at any time during the rollover.