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Jason Kerrigan:
What’s interesting about rollover crashes is they actually take a much longer period of time. Frontal crash site impact on the road might be over in one hundred milliseconds. A rollover crash could take 10 or 15 seconds in general. Your body is being drawn up toward the roof.
You’re upside down or you’re on your side or you’re at an angle and when you get down it’s going to be a severe severe impact. This is the Center for Applied Biomechanics and here we apply the theories in mechanical engineering through the human body to describe how injury occurs in traumatic events.
Rollover crashes are about 2 percent of all automobile crashes on the rode, but account for about one-third of the vehicle occupant fatalities. Rollover is a major public health problem.
Currently the only crash test used by the federal government to assess a rollover crash worthiness is a roof crush test. And what we’re doing is trying to come up with a dynamic.
What we’re doing is trying to come up with a dynamic crash test that actually rolls the vehicle and has it impact the ground the same way it would in a real rollover crash. And if it rolls once, it’ll be this way, but if it rolls a second time you’ll see the scratches over top that were turned on some funny angle.
So we’re exploring a lot of questions related to rollover crashes but one of the things that we’re working on is how biofidelic or how human-like is a crash dummie in a rollover.
Qi Zhang:
What I’m trying to do here is to improve the current crash dummies to more accurately emulate how the human body responds in a rollover crash.
Kerrigan:
Our goal is to supply information to the community we want to learn how to protect occupants in rollover crashes if we can get that information out to the manufacturer’s they could use that information to design environment. So that when you are in a rollover crash you have the least chance to sustaining a serious injury or dying.
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