Reconstruction and simulation of the vehicle to road safety barrier oblique collision based on the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm

Vehicle crash modeling and reconstruction is an important field for research since the safety statistics from many countries show that the fatality rate of passenger vehicle occupants involved in road accidents is high. In particular, side impact are considered to be a serious problem. For this reason, in this paper, there is presented a methodology to reconstruct a given vehicle to road safety barrier oblique collision. An easy to analyze, viscoelastic model is established to represent a vehicle crash event. The reasonable modeling simplifications are assumed (namely: the vehicle is rigid and deformation of the safety barrier is negligible) which let the computational efficiency of the proposed approach improve, whereas simultaneously does not affect the accuracy of the simulation results. The Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm is applied to estimate parameters of the two-dimensional Maxwell model which represents a vehicle oblique collision. The obtained results verify that the fidelity of such a model is high and its behavior closely resembles the kinematics of the reference fullscale vehicle.