Improvement in numerical reconstruction for vehicle-pedestrian accidents

A full-scale vehicle-pedestrian crash simulation has been applied to pedestrian accident reconstruction worldwide in the past decade. Considering that the optimization method and pedestrian human model play an important role in this simulation, this study makes some improvements in them according to the characteristics of real-world pedestrian accidents. On the one hand, the sequential linear programming method replaces classical manual optimization for pedestrian accident reconstruction which can automatically vary pre-impact parameters to minimize the error between simulation and real data. On the other hand, new anthropometry results and coupled finite element (FE)-multi-body (MB) modelling technology are applied to pedestrian human modelling. A Chinese pedestrian model generator is developed in order to avoid using the Western human population in China, and an FE leg model is combined into the MB pedestrian model to perform a more detailed analysis of long bone fracture. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the capability of and necessity for the above improvements. The evaluation is conducted by the reconstruction of three fatal pedestrian accidents. The first two cases are mathematically reconstructed on the basis of the rest position and pedestrian injury respectively. The influence of the anthropometry parameters is illustrated by the reconstruction of the last case.