Energy loss in vehicle collisions from permanent deformation: an extension of the “Triangle Method

The paper presents an extension of the ‘Triangle Method’, to evaluate the energy loss in road accidents. The improvement of the method allows to evaluate the energy loss by both the colliding vehicles in car to car impacts, considering the main possible configurations of accident. The limits of applicability of the method are those of the Campbell’s method [K.E. Campbell, Energy basis for collision severity, SAE paper 740565, Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc., Warrendale, Pennsylvania, 1974; A.G. Fonda, Principles of crush energy determination, SAE 1999-01-0106, Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc.,Warrendale, Pennsylvania, 1999; N.S. Tumbas and R.A. Smith, Measurement protocol for quantifying vehicle damage from an energy basis point of view, SAE paper 880072, Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc., Warrendale, Pennsylvania, 1988; G.A. Nystrom, G. Kost, and S.M. Werner, Stiffness parameters for vehicle collision analysis, SAE paper 910119, Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc., Warrendale, Pennsylvania, 1991; J.A. Neptune, G.Y. Blair, and J.E. Flynn, A method for quantifying vehicle crush stiffness coefficients, SAE paper 920607, Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc., Warrendale, Pennsylvania, 1992]. The advantage over the usual methods are that the method does not require the knowledge of the stiffness of the vehicles and only two parameters are needed to define the damage geometry. The latter can be easily evaluated by visual inspection on a suitable photographical documentation of the damages, without the need to perform any direct measurement on the vehicles. Furthermore, the method can be used also in the very frequent cases in which some of the damage data about one of the vehicles are missing or in accidents involving lateral parts of the vehicle as zones near the wheels or the front, that have different behaviour from that tested in the classical crash tests. The error analysis developed shows that the errors due to the application of the extended method are negligible and fall in the range generally considered acceptable in road accident reconstruction.