Illustrations of Equivalent Methods to Reproduce Vehicle and Occupant Dynamics as a Pedagogical Tool

Abstract

When explaining to a lay audience the magnitude of forces or accelerations imparted to vehicles or experienced by vehicle occupants during a motor vehicle collision, it is often helpful to recast the critical results in terms of other physical systems or impact configurations which will reproduce the equivalent dynamics of the subject accident to serve as a conceptual aid for the audience. In this article, we present the basis for such equivalents and explicitly demonstrate, using two physics simulation software packages, that such equivalents are based on nothing more than the application of the laws of physics.