Description
This fully updated edition presents practices and principles applicable for the reconstruction of automobile and commercial truck crashes. Like the First Edition, it starts at the very beginning with fundamental principles, information sources, and data gathering and inspection techniques for accident scenes and vehicles. It goes on to show how to analyze photographs and crash test data. The book presents tire fundamentals and shows how to use them in spreadsheet-based reverse trajectory analysis. Such methods are also applied to reconstructing rollover crashes. Impacts with narrow fixed objects are discussed. Impact mechanics, structural dynamics, and conservation-based reconstruction methods are presented. The book contains a comprehensive treatment of crush energy and how to develop structural stiffness properties from crash test data. Computer simulations are reviewed and discussed.
Extensively revised, this edition contains new material on side pole impacts. It has entirely new chapters devoted to low-speed impacts, downloading electronic data from vehicles, deriving structural stiffness in side impacts, and incorporating electronic data into accident reconstructions
Table of Contents
1. General Principles
2. Tire Models
3. Subdividing Noncollision Trajectories with Splines
4. A Program for Reverse Trajectory Calculation Using Splines
5. Time–Distance Studies
6. Vehicle Data Sources for the Accident Reconstructionist
7. Accident Investigation
8. Obtaining Electronic Data from Vehicles
9. Getting Information from Photographs
10. Measuring Vehicle Crush
11. Filtering Impulse Data
12. Obtaining and Using NHTSA Crash Test Data
13. Analyzing Crash Pulse Data
14. Downloading and Analyzing NHTSA Load Cell Barrier Data
15. Rollover Investigation
16. Rollover Analysis
17. Vehicle Structure Crash Dynamics
18. Impact Mechanics
19. Reconstruction Using Conservation of Momentum and Energy
20. Constant-Stiffness Structures and Crash Plots
21. Crush Energy in Accident Vehicles and Nonlinear Structures
22. Structural Stiffness in Side Impacts
23. Narrow Fixed-Object Collisions
24. Crush Energy in Underride/Override Collisions
25. Low-Speed Impacts
26. Reconstructing Coplanar Collisions, Including Energy Dissipation
27. Checking the Results in Coplanar Collision Analysis
28. Incorporating Electronic Data into Accident Reconstructions
29. Simulation Models and Other Computer Programs
