VCA performes Computer Reconstructions of Traffic Accidents using PAM-Crash with the Virthuman
Petr Pavlata
Computer simulations of physical processes in the automotive industry are beautiful and strictly logical ...
VCA is an engineering company which supports R&D projects of industrial partners from Automotive. One of VCA's present activities are reconstructions of traffic accidents using virtual tools as Virtual Crash or PC Crash. It is a worldwide standard which works almost with rigid body vehicle models.
VCA brings new technologies to this branch using virtual simulations of fully deformable vehicle models and the human body models Virthuman developed for PAM-Crash explicite solver. One of interesting tasks was the virtual simulation of a bus accident when the 18m long articulated bus crashed the column of the traffic sign portal, see photos.
During the whole procedure, VCA verified the FE model with the frontal full-scale crash test of a reference bus of the same bus producer.
The goal of the whole virtual approach was an implementation of a number of scalable human body models Virthuman which can evaluate the biomechanical load of passengers on the board.
Such techniques can be used for the assessment of biomechanical load of various accident scenarios and can iniciated vehicle interior design changes to minimize future heavy injuries or even fatalities. This is a way how to simply increase passive safety of any vehicle.