Impact conditions of motorcyclist per body segment

Abstract

Multy-body simulation is applied to compute the motorcyclist’s kinematic in case of virtual motorcycle versus car accident. Results show that for over 50% of the simulations, the impact velocities of the whole body exceed 8 m/s when impacting the vehicle and 4 m/s at the time of road impact. The head impacts the vehicle most often with a speed exceeding 7.5 m/s in the fronto-lateral impact configuration, when thorax, abdomen and pelvis are the most exposed segments for the other impact configurations, with impact velocities beeing in the range of 10 to 15 m/s. Changes in BMI leads to minor influence on the impact velocities of the different body, especially for the first impact. As expected, body impact speed increases with the speed of the motorcycle, for both, the first and the second impacts. These results will contribute to an improvement in the evaluation and optimization of motorcyclist’s protection garnement.

Keywords:

• Body segment
• motorcyclist
• parametric study
• multibody simulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of the ‘SECU2RM’ project partly funded by the French Road Safety Foundation.