One application of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) database was to investigate frontal pole barrier tests. The results from nineteen staged pole barrier tests were extracted from the database to evaluate various methods for relating the pre-impact speed to the observed crush. A common method for estimating speed involves calculation of the crush energy and does not appear to be useful for frontal pole collisions. Other methods make use of empirical formulas which relate the maximum observed crush to the impact speed. Two such formulas were evaluated, and a new formula was developed which better fits the staged crash test data.
Abstract