Frontal collisions between vehicles are one of the most severe accidents that usually occur in our roads, and the incompatibility between masses, stiffness and geometries of vehicles has a great influence in the consequences of the collision. It is necessary to go forward in the reduction of the aggressiveness of vehicles to each other without reducing self-protection. In order to research about compatibility, simplified mathematical models of collision will be very useful. In this paper, it is described the development of a frontal collision model especially conceived to reproduce the factors that may influence the compatibility. The model was adjusted to represent the behaviour of several vehicle types representative of the car-park, and was validated through real accidents data and vehicle-to-vehicle crash tests. Finally, the usefulness of the model for compatibility study is shown by an application example, an analysis of the sensitivity to the variation of certain design parameters. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting