Vehicle accident reconstruction by a reduced order impact model

Road accident reconstruction by simulation represents an important step to determine what happened, as well as responsibilities of subjects involved in the event. To allow the reconstruction, a large variety of well-established simulative approaches are available on the market, e.g., impulse-momentum models, finite element method and multi-body systems: the choice on the appropriate methodology mainly depends on the reconstruction expert’s needs in terms of calculation time and accuracy in the description of the event’s overall dynamics. Most of the available techniques do not simultaneously provide detailed information about kinematics and deformation due to the impact, or considerable calculation resources are required to accomplish the task. The present work thus introduces a special-purpose, reduced order model devoted to accident reconstruction: discretization in a 2D domain of the sole vehicle contour allows to limit the calculation time. The ruling equations on which the 2D road accident reconstruction is based are given in detail, to demonstrate the approach. Referring to five vehicle-to-vehicle impact cases, the compatibility between the actual event dynamics and the results of simulations allowed to emphasize the method potential in the application field.