A major cause of serious injury in motorcycle accidents is the rider's leg being trapped between the motorcycle and a car. This paper gives results from a number of full-scale impact tests of motorcycles with and without leg-protecting fairings. Motorcycles were crashed into a flat, rigid barrier inclined at 30° to their direction of travel. Three basic configurations were studied: motorcycles with no leg protection, with hard leg protection that absorbed negligible amounts of energy, and with soft leg protectors that absorbed 5 to 10 percent of the kinetic energy on impact. The use of a leg-protecting fairing substantially reduced damage to a dummy rider's legs in crash tests, and a protector that absorbs some energy seems preferable to one that does not. These results were achieved without increasing the risk of other types of injury
Author(s):
B. P. Chinn, P. Hopes, M. A. Macaulay
Affiliated:
Transport and Road Research Laboratory, Dept. of Transport,, Brunel Univ., Uxbridge, UK
Pages: 4
Event:
International Technical Conference on Enhanced Safety of Vehicles
Also in:
Accident Reconstruction Technologies-Pedestrians and Motorcycles in Automotive Collisions-PT-35
Related Topics:
Impact tests
Leg
Two or three wheeled vehicles
Fairings
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