Stefan Kirschbichler

Methods to Prevent or Mitigate Accidents with Large Animals

Although accidents with animals represent a small portion in the official statistics, these accidents have an economic effect. The regulatory costs in Germany added up to an average of 370–464 million Euros annually in the years between 2000 and 2005. The insurance companies registered between 210,000 and 235,000 deer accidents on average every year. The largest part of the data collected by the insurance companies is accidents with damage to property. But accidents with large animals are a danger to vehicle occupants. German statistics for accidents with animals for this period show between 18 and 28 fatally injured persons and between 580 and 750 severely injured and 2,100–2,600 light casualties every year. Accidents that are caused by evasive maneuvers causing running-off track and finally colliding with the infrastructure or causing a cross-over collision have not been taken into account. The aim of this investigation is to evaluate typical accident scenarios and accident simulation with large animals. In particular, the effects on the vehicle occupants are investigated by multi-body simulation methods. The occupant load for accidents with animals is determined and influencing factors on the load are derived. Based on these investigations, avoidability scenarios are developed and methods are introduced that are relevant to the vehicle (active and passive safety) and also to the infrastructure and the driver. The objective is to develop effective counteractions in order to avoid accidents with animals or at least mitigate the accident aftermath.

Safety Measures for Avoiding or Mitigating the Occupant Exposure in Collisions with Large Animals

Road accidents involving large animals are responsible for a considerable number of fatalities; these are e.g. elk in Northern Europe or camels in Middle East, Horn of Africa and Maghreb. In order to address this topic, investigations concerning active and passive road safety have been launched at the King Saud University and at Graz University of Technology. Data of real accidents or accident statistics are not available in the required quality to gather typical accident scenarios. Therefore generic accidents types were derived and critical load cases were determined by means of multi body and finite element simulations. It was found that the vehicle acceleration due to the impact is not a safety issue, but the finite element simulations showed that massive local intrusions into the passenger compartment are the main cause for severe occupant injuries. Therefore, concepts for the prevention of critical intrusions were examined. In a first step the space required for the occupant movement due to the rather mediocre acceleration levels in car-to-large animal accidents was determined by multi-body simulation. In a second step different approaches preventing intrusions into the occupant-movement-space were analyzed by finite element simulation. In addition, the possible effects and requirements of active systems have been studied to demonstrate the potential of combined measures.