The Physics of Automobile Accidents Essay examples

When the car is accelerating, there must be an equal force to cancel out the car's acceleration to make it come to a complete restrest. When the car hits a wall, the wall essentially is hitting the car as well. The acceleration of the vehicle and the force caused by the wall cancels each other out causing the car to come to a complete stop. However, the passenger without a seatbelt does not have anything opposing it. Therefore the passenger will continue to accelerate until it has a force to counter it and make it come to rest. To minimize injuries to passengers in vehicles, we must find ways to minimize the collision. What makes car crashes so deadly are that it happens so quickly, and that it occurs at high speeds. In order to minimize collisions, we must find ways to slow down our acceleration and give us more time to do

Momentum is the mass of an object times it’s velocity. The velocity of an object would be it’s rate and change of direction. A collision occurs when two or more objects collide with each other. This causes the kinetic energy, the energy of motion, to be transferred

The faster you drive, the larger the force of impact your car has. This being said, if you were going 60 mph and you crashed into a object, the force of impact would be sudden and jerking. You would definitely feel the impact and are more likely to be injured. However, if you were going 10 mph and you crashed into an object, the force of impact would still be evident, but you would be less likely to be jerked roughly and injured. If you were in a small compact car going 45 mph and are hit by a semi, your injuries are likely to be catastrophic and the driver of the semi’s injuries are likely going to be minor.

Getting in a car accident is an unnerving thing. You never know what can happen and if your lucky you might see it coming. Well as often as these accidents occur, it happened to Spencer and I on one fateful summer evening.

cceleration)). This law is in relation to crumple zones as the crumple zone decelerates and the force in which the person in the car would feel. Crumple zones and Newton’s Laws do relate to each other. As the car contents an object, it will cause the car to come to a stop or slow down gradually (1st Law). The car has a certain amount of force, which can be calculated by Newton’s 2nd Law. The result of the car’s mass and its acceleration. Because the force can be lowered by making the impact over a longer time, by making the crumple zone collapse slowly instead of an instant collision that barely decelerates, which means that the people in the car aren’t as badly affected as they would’ve been if there was no crumple zone the force is lessened

For a crash to be catastrophic different factors need to be applied. The first is kinetic energy, if two cars crashed and they both were going at high speeds their kinetic energy would be very high causing the accident to be catastrophic. Also if the drivers were not wearing any seatbelts there would be no inertia stopping them. The last law is gravity, if a small car was driving at normal speed and crashed against another car the injury would be minor because the kinetic energy is not high and the masses either.

Motor vehicle collisions stand as one of the leading causes of death in North America. Teens and young adults who have recently gotten their license usually account for about one fatality every 10 minutes. Researchers from the New England Journal of Medicine have done a study on the occurrence of car crashes and the average statistics for crashes during the year shows that about one person in 50 will become involved in a motor vehicle collision. For the people who have become involved in a crash; only about 1 percent of them will die, then 10 percent will be hospitalized, and 25 percent will unfortunately become temporarily disabled. (Donald A. Redelmeier, M.D., and Robert J. Tibshirani, Ph.D., New England Journal of

In today’s world, many drivers have become complacent in the fact that the vehicle in which they are operating can be a deadly weapon. A two-ton hunk of metal flying down the freeway at speeds excess of seventy miles an hour carries much potential for catastrophe.

Momentum is mass and velocity multiplied together. More so, it’s “the difficultly of stopping a moving object” (Jones, 2013). One thing that acts upon

car will accelerate and how fast it will go. Newton’s second law is the easiest to understand in relation to a car’s acceleration. Newton’s second law mathematically states Force=(mass)(acceleration) (Murphy 78). This law explains why cars that need to accelerate fast should be relatively light in weight compared to other cars. Removing mass, such as a bumper, radio or fancy upholstery reduces the weight of

Along with accidents not only comes a little headache or a broken bone, but injuries that stay with you forever such as whiplash and brain damage. Most brain damage incidents occur when you are involved in a side impact collision and the side of your head hits the glass (brain injury). Side impact airbags are just one of the many ways in which this type of life threatening injury can be avoided (whiplash). There is also whiplash, which hurls your head violently, and usually results in long term disability. Since whiplash is so hard to avoid, it can only be avoided by reducing the number of accidents on the streets. Also one of the most painful and most traumatizing injuries that we encounter in accidents are bone fractures, which occur in 65% of all accidents (Bush 11). So in turn by making these cars safer we can all avoid these painful, traumatizing, life-threatening injuries.

Several systematic occurred in this experiment, but the most important one would have been the fact that the air hockey table was not completely level. This impacted upon the experiment in two ways. In the first experiment where the red puck is initially stationary, as the table was not level it moved around before the black puck collided with it. To overcome this the red puck had to be held in place and as mentioned before this would have provided and external force acting upon the puck. The unevenness of the air hockey table also meant that there was a possibility of friction acting on the pucks while they were moving. In the third collision with the Velcro another systematic error occurred. When the two pucks collided and stuck together they did not continue straight, instead they rotated. This is not linear momentum but rather it is angular momentum. This is reflected in the results as the magnitude of the initial and final momentum of the system is equal, but the

Car accidents can happen to drivers anytime, anywhere. "According to the National Safety Council, which stated that more than 2.5 million collisions back every year, making it the most common type of car accidents, it is also known that the accident rear end as incidents of injury, because the nature of the collision leads often in whiplash injury the driver in the car in front and about 20% of people who participated in a rear collision injury symptoms of this kind. ", (NHTSA, auto-accident-resource.com). Among the car accidents, the teenage group is the only age group who is number of deaths is increasing instead of decreasing. Also, all the people are exposed to risk and actually every one of them has got car

The Physics of NASCAR by Diandra Leslie-Pelecky: How can a car going 190 mph operate with precision? How can race car drivers walk away from disastrous crashes? The author, a physicist, caught a NASCAR race on television and wondered those same things. In The Physics of NASCAR, Leslie-Pelecky

When a car is being made it must follow three principles of safety “1. The impact from a collision is absorbed gradually by controlled deformation of the outer parts of the car. 2.The passenger area is kept intact as long as possible. 3. The interior is designed to reduce the risk of incident”. Active safety features are added to cars to reduce possible injuries, some of those features include braking systems, aerodynamic stability and bad weather equipment. Other features such as head restraints, bumpers, and auto aligning steering wheels help the driver stay