Effective Impact Velocity from Vehicle Deformation - A Preliminary Study

Investigations of injuries from automobile accidents are of limited valve unless they can be correlated with the severity of the accident. In order to provide a uniform base of accident severity, a method for relating the severity of impact to different types of objects to the barrier impact has been developed. The barrier impact is used as the reference since it is the most severe type of accident. The result is an effective barrier speed which relates the severity of the accident to an equivalent barrier speed.