Experiment System of Motorcycle Impact Injury Using Electric Motor Traction

Although motorcycle crash is one of the most common causes of death and injury, there hasn’t been a standard experiment system to simulate the generation of the resulting motorcycle impact injuries. A unique motor drive unit (MDU) and motorcycle crash simulation unit (MCSU) were developed to establish a short-track and high-accuracy experiment system of motorcycle impact injury. The control hardware of the MDU consists of a “two DC motors” system and a “two drums, closed-loop, friction transmission” system, and the control software of the MDU has a novel “carriage acceleration profile control program” which was specially set up to prevent the cusp-like pulse and oscillation phenomenon in the acceleration stage close to the uniform velocity. The unique motorcycle sled and energy absorber constitute a novel MCSU. Thirteen vehicle frontal impact tests (50, 64, 80km/h) were carried out to validate the motor traction properties of this experiment system of motorcycle impact injury, while 18 motorcyclist ejection injury simulations (30, 40, 50km/h) and 3 motorcycle-pedestrian impact injury simulations (50km/h) were carried out to examine its simulation capability. Research results show that: (1)Using a unique generation algorithm of the carriage accelerationand velocity-time curve and unique manufacturing techniques of hardware components, the apparatus presented in this paper has a potential to become the first short-track experiment system of motorcycle impact injury. (2)Due to a high weight capacity with the ability to propel whole vehicles, the MDU can be used in the full motorcycle/full vehicle crash tests or vehicle component sled impact tests.