A: For the purposes of a damage analysis:
- given the variation of the stiffness of all vehicles along the side (wheels? sill engagement or not? door pillars? etc) a single side stiffness will be applicable to either side of the vehicle.
And then do you include induced damage in your damage measurements or not?
Commercial vendors selling crush coefficients use 4-5 mph Front/Rear "zero damage intercept" and 2.5 mph for side impacts "zero damage intercept"...
- That means that every vehicle in a new car sales lot has 5 mph front/rear damage and 2.5 mph side damage!
- CRASH with simplified trajectory and damage analysis was created as a pre-processor for SMAC and then the "damage analysis only" was embraced by NHTSA for their NASS statistical research
- NHTSA is looking for trends in injuries vs deltaV for crashes all over the country and liked that using 'damage only' was convenient. They wanted consistent results and expect that errors would wash out in the large sample size. Due to the CRASH related litigation circus (lawyers subpoenaing NHTSA for information on CRASH etc.) NHTSA created a reformulated clone of CRASH called Winsmash
We've been cautioning about the limitations of damage analysis since 1987!
I am once again on my CRASH n burn soapbox.
I hope and expect that you are using damage analysis as a supplemental form of reconstruction and/or your case has limited damage only information.
For those reasons it is much better than a WAG**
For additional information:
- Is CRASH damage analysis a virtual relationship?
- Should a CRASH type damage analysis include induced damage?
- "No Damage Intercept" of CRASH
- Crush Coefficients Conversions: CRASH (McHenry), Campbell, WinSMASH (Prasad)
- And the McHenry Forum subject related to damage analysis, etc: CRASH & Damage/Momentum Analysis