The Traffic Accident Reconstruction Origin -ARnews-

Re: Chain reaction accident

Bruno Schmidt (SchmidtBF@aol.com)
Sat, 19 Dec 1998 22:34:18 -0500 (EST)

Paul,

Regarding your second set of comments on the use of energy--many people will debate with you the merits of using crush energy in an accident reconstruction analysis. It must be done with care, and there are sources of error (just as there are with momentum analysis), but too many people are utilizing it, writing SAE articles about it, spending a lot of time researching it to justify discarding it.

Secondly, if you ignore crush energy in your analysis, and then obtain calculated impact speeds that are "too low for the damage" (your words), you are saying in effect that you can't obtain reliable results if you ignore the damage energy. Your results are obtained by assigning zero energy loss to damage to the vehicles. Are your speeds consistent with what you would expect for undamaged vehicles? That's what you forced your results to be by ignoring the crush energy in your energy analysis.

Bruno Schmidt
SchmidtBF@aol.com

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