Evaluation of a momentum based impact model in frontal car collisions for the prospective assessment of ADAS

Motivation: The advent of active safety systems calls for the development of appropriate testing methods that are able to assess their capabilities to avoid accidents or lower impact speeds and thus, to mitigate the injury severity. Up to now the assessment is mostly based on the decrease of the collision speed due to CMS (collision mitigation systems). In order to assess the effects on injury severity developing methods, that are able to predict collision parameters correlating with the risk of getting injured, such as delta-v, for different impact situations is a mandatory task. Objective: In this study a momentum based impact model is assessed in terms of reliability to solve the collision mechanics and therefore to predict delta-v for frontal car collisions. Method: Real accidents were re-simulated using pre-defined input parameters for the impact model (virtual forward simulation – VFS). Subsequently the impact model was analyzed for its sensitivity to specific input parameters. Conclusion: It was shown that VFS works for full impacts while improvements and optimizations are required for impacts that include a sliding movement in the contact zone of the vehicles.