An Analytical Review and Extension of Two Decades of Research Related to PC-Crash Simulation Software

PC-Crash is a vehicular accident simulation software that is widely used by the accident reconstruction community. The goal of this article is to review the prior literature that has addressed the capabilities of PC-Crash and its accuracy and reliability for various applications (planar collisions, rollovers, and human motion). In addition, this article aims to add additional analysis of the capabilities of PC-Crash for simulating planar collisions and rollovers. Simulation analysis of five planar collisions originally reported and analyzed by Bailey [2000] are reexamined. For all five of these collisions, simulations were obtained with the actual impact speeds that exhibited excellent visual agreement with the physical evidence. These simulations demonstrate that, for each case, the PC-Crash software had the ability to generate a simulation that matched the actual impact speeds and the known physical evidence. Simulation of a full-scale rollover test reported by Asay [2010] is also examined. For this test, we obtained a simulation that exhibited an excellent visual match with the pre-roll tire marks and furrows and in which the vehicle rolled 7 times, just as it did in the actual test. The rest position of the vehicle was well matched, though a portion of the simulated roll trajectory did not match the actual roll trajectory. These areas of additional analysis extend the prior literature.