- Be Careful!
- In the paper they presented some ideas for a standardized protocol to measure damaged vehicles which included special cases like bowing, etc. I recommend the paper for any and all who use damage analysis techniques, whatever flavor of CRASH or damage analysis you use. The standardization of technique is so that anyone measuring a damaged vehicle should produce the same crush measurements.
For example, in cases of bowing, some extra energy was required to bow the vehicle so the damage measurement protocol should include consideration for the extra energy (or a 'did the vehicle bow?' and 'how much' question should be added and considered in the analysis).
And note: CRASH was originally created as a preprocessor for SMAC.
- The mathematical formulation for CRASH is that damage measurements were to be of the direct contact damage only. When NHTSA adopted CRASH damage analysis for the NASS statistical studies they found it was underestimating the DeltaV so they changed the protocol to include the induced damage.
- Most are based on a single crash test from the NHTSA NCAP program.
- From a scientific standpoint, a single test point (measurement) with an assumed 'no damage' intercept is a very crude definition of the crush properties of a vehicle.
- See our 1987 warning about the crudeness of the commercial crush coefficients for CRASH
Be sure to use other techniques such as momentum analysis, simulation, etc. in addition to damage analysis to check and refine your damage analysis results.