Motorcyclist Protection Systems: Analysis of the Crash Test Tolerances of the European Technical Specification and the Spanish Standard

Abstract

One of the most frequent and harmful kinds of motorcycle accidents is an impact against the post of the roadside barrier, so designers have developed some motorcyclist protection system (MPS) to reduce it. Some countries have developed a standard testing procedure, like the Spanish UNE-135900-2008 standard, identical to the CEN's recently approved Technical Specification (TS 1317-8). These standards specify the test procedure to obtain the behaviour of the MPS, but experimental tests have shown some dispersion of results for identical tests of the same barrier. There are some theories to explain this but the most reasonable is the influence of tolerances of some of the test variables in the final result like impact height, impact velocity, yaw angle, and mass. To analyze these theories, numerical analysis that can measure the independent influence of each parameter in the results has been used, using a correlated numerical model, a common and experimentally tested barrier, and an MPS. So, the results of this paper show how some parameters of impact significantly influence the behaviour of the system, changing impact severity, potential damage, and injuries. Therefore, the test tolerances do not guarantee repeatability and can accept systems too harmful for the same test conditions, so it will be necessary to reduce limit deviations of some impact variables.