Automotive Accident Reconstruction-Practices and Principles, Second Edition

✍ Scribed by Donald E. Struble (Author); John D. Struble (Author)

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Leaves: 423
• Edition: 2
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This fully updated edition presents practices and principles applicable for the reconstruction of automobile and commercial truck crashes. Like the First Edition, it starts at the very beginning with fundamental principles, information sources, and data gathering and inspection techniques for accident scenes and vehicles. It goes on to show how to analyze photographs and crash test data. The book presents tire fundamentals and shows how to use them in spreadsheet-based reverse trajectory analysis. Such methods are also applied to reconstructing rollover crashes. Impacts with narrow fixed objects are discussed. Impact mechanics, structural dynamics, and conservation-based reconstruction methods are presented. The book contains a comprehensive treatment of crush energy and how to develop structural stiffness properties from crash test data. Computer simulations are reviewed and discussed.

Extensively revised, this edition contains new material on side pole impacts. It has entirely new chapters devoted to low-speed impacts, downloading electronic data from vehicles, deriving structural stiffness in side impacts, and incorporating electronic data into accident reconstructions

✦ Table of Contents

1. General Principles

2. Tire Models

3. Subdividing Noncollision Trajectories with Splines

4. A Program for Reverse Trajectory Calculation Using Splines

5. Time–Distance Studies

6. Vehicle Data Sources for the Accident Reconstructionist

7. Accident Investigation

8. Obtaining Electronic Data from Vehicles

9. Getting Information from Photographs

10. Measuring Vehicle Crush

11. Filtering Impulse Data

12. Obtaining and Using NHTSA Crash Test Data

13. Analyzing Crash Pulse Data

14. Downloading and Analyzing NHTSA Load Cell Barrier Data

15. Rollover Investigation

16. Rollover Analysis

17. Vehicle Structure Crash Dynamics

18. Impact Mechanics

19. Reconstruction Using Conservation of Momentum and Energy

20. Constant-Stiffness Structures and Crash Plots

21. Crush Energy in Accident Vehicles and Nonlinear Structures

22. Structural Stiffness in Side Impacts

23. Narrow Fixed-Object Collisions

24. Crush Energy in Underride/Override Collisions

25. Low-Speed Impacts

26. Reconstructing Coplanar Collisions, Including Energy Dissipation

27. Checking the Results in Coplanar Collision Analysis

28. Incorporating Electronic Data into Accident Reconstructions

29. Simulation Models and Other Computer Programs