Model for Determination of Vehicle Trajectories in Three-Dimensional Roll-Over Crashes

In order to reconstruct three-dimensional vehicle collision accidents, the critical conditions of vehicle pitching and rolling were derived in the vehicle's three-dimensional coordinate system by analyzing the relationship between collision impulse moment and inverse gravity moment. The movement trajectory model of vehicle rolling with ground reaction force was constructed according to the kinematics theory and the relationship of kinetic energy conversion. For a real accident case, a comparative study between the reconstruction analysis results and the vehicle traces remained in the accident scene was conducted using the accident reconstruction system based on the above model and PC-Crash. The results show that the vehicle stationary position and attitude reconstructed by the model are consistent with the actual state in the accident scene; the reconstructed trajectories are consistent with those remained in the accident scene, except a smaller curvature of the passenger car's left front wheel.