Automotive crash data analysis and reconstruction is vital for ensuring automotive safety. The objective of vehicle crash reconstruction is to determine the vehicle’s motion before, during, and after the crash, as well as the impact on occupants in terms of injuries. Simulation approaches, such as PC CrashTM, have been developed to understand pre-crash and post-crash vehicle motion, rather than the crash phase behavior. Over the past few decades, crash phase simulations have utilized vehicle finite element models.
While multibody simulation tools are suitable for crash simulations, they often require detailed crash test data to accurately capture vehicle behavior, which is not always readily available. This paper proposes a solution to this limitation by incorporating crash test data from databases, such as NHTSA, Global NCAP, consumer rating reports, and videos, along with a multibody-based approach, to conduct crash phase simulations.
In this study, multibody vehicle models were created in MADYMOTM and validated using existing vehicle crash test reports. The multibody simulations were further validated against the crash data for a known crash scenario. The impact conditions of the vehicle occupants with the vehicle interior, as obtained from the multibody simulations, were then used in finite element simulations to estimate injuries and compare them with known injury data.
To establish confidence in the proposed method, a vehicle model was developed and validated using detailed crash test data obtained from NHTSA. Subsequently, a real-world crash case from the National automotive sampling system/Crashworthiness data system (NASS/CDS) was simulated, followed by implementation with a crash case from the Delhi-Jaipur highway. The proposed method demonstrated promising results even with limited data availability.
The proposed multibody simulation method emerged as an effective alternative for vehicle crash reconstruction and occupant simulations. It played a crucial role in determining occupant crash conditions, such as occupant velocities and the orientation of impact with interiors. These occupant crash conditions were further utilized to simulate the occupant’s impact with the vehicle interior using finite element human body and interior surface models. Injuries to the human body were estimated from these simulations and correlated with known injuries, providing additional confidence in the proposed methodology.
