Accident Reconstruction Fundamentals: A Guide To Understanding Vehicle Collisions

Traffic Reconstruction Fundamentals has been written for Attorneys, Insurance Adjuster and the engineer that is new to Traffic Accident Reconstruction. It covers the basic fundamental in an easy to understand style. The best way to understand a subject is to work case problems. The material discussed throughout the book uses example cases to demonstrate how speeds are calculated. Chapter 1, Vehicle Skids: Want to know how the engineer calculates the speed of vehicles from skid marks. This chapter starts with simple skids and progresses into more complicated skids with grades and different skid surfaces. What is the difference between coefficient of friction and a drag factor? Also, how do you determine the drag factor for vehicles where one or more wheels did not skid? Chapter 2, Falls, Flips and Vaults: How do you determine the speed of a vehicle that runs off of a roadway embankment? Sometimes a skidding vehicle will flip or even roll. These topics are covered in an easy to understand methodology. Chapter 3, Vehicle Collisions Analysis, Conservation of Momentum: Determining speeds using the Conservation of Momentum is a favorite method to determine speeds. Find out what information is needed and how to calculate speeds using this method. Ever wonder how Newton's Laws apply to reconstruction? Wonder no more. What is the difference between Collinear collisions (in-line collisions) and angled collisions. Each method is explained and examples calculations shown. Chapter 4, Vehicle Collision Analysis: Conservation of Energy: Engineers use the Conservation of Energy when only crush damage of vehicles are available. Roadway evidence starts to deteriorate immediately after an accident but crush damage to vehicles stay. How to measure crush damage for energy calculations is detailed. Where to obtain stiffness coefficients for speed calculations? All explained. Chapter 5, Heavy Truck Crashes: The approach to calculating speeds of truck/tractors and semi-trailers are different from cars and pickup trucks. Even the terminology can be overwhelming. This is explained and illustrated. Heavy trucks have air-brake systems and can be the cause of a truck accident. The method of investigating heavy trucks with air-brake systems is carefully detailed and also, how to determine the brake efficiency of the truck's brake system. Understanding technical material and being able to explain the material to a jury is the key to helping clients win cases. This was the objective in writing this book and it has proven to be very beneficial understand the complex subject of traffic accident reconstruction.