Simulating Moving Motorcycle to Moving Car Crashes

There has been little published research into simulating two-moving motorcycle-to-car collisions for the purpose of accident reconstruction. In this paper a series of two-moving crash tests were conducted to study collisions of this type. These tests used a range of speeds for the cars and the motorcycles involved, with perpendicular and oblique intersection collision impact configurations. The tests were then simulated with two popular crash simulation packages which were not designed to simulate motorcycles. The purpose of this study was to evaluate existing techniques and develop new techniques for simulating motorcycles in these software packages and then to examine the ability of each package to simulate a two-moving motorcycle-to-car crash. The results demonstrate that it is indeed possible to simulate a motorcycle in these packages and that both packages can simulate two-moving motorcycle-to-car crashes reasonably well. Obviously, as with any simulation of a physical event, there are limitations, and they are thoroughly discussed.