The Carleton University Crash Dummy (CUCD) team will be performing its final crash test of the academic year on Friday, March 27 in co-ordination with Ottawa Police Service. The project is run by 22 fourth-year mechanical and aerospace engineering students and is led by Associate Professor Mojtaba Ahmadi, Professor Robert Bell and Assistant Professor Andrew Speirs in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
“The crash test dummy project is a unique and challenging design experience for our undergraduate engineering students,” said Speirs. “Our close collaboration with the Ottawa Police has been crucial in the project development, allowing the students to gather data on injuries that may help improve bicycle safety.”
When: Friday, March 27, 2015
Setup will begin at 8:30 a.m. and media are invited at 11 a.m.
Where: National Research Council, 1200 Montreal Rd., parking lot next to Building M27.
This is the fourth year of the project. Each year it is refined and this year the automated launch time and sensing capabilities to determine injuries resulting from bike/car collisions have been improved.
The morning of the final test, students will set up a track, prepare the crash dummy, insert sensing systems and arrange cameras around the scene for video analysis.
The team will place the crash dummy they designed on a bicycle, which will then be placed on a track. The car will be travelling in one direction and the bike will be heading in the other and they will be calibrated to collide.
The team has data-acquisition systems to gather concrete results from the test. The team will record the acceleration of the head and chest to determine the nature of head and internal injuries sustained in the crash. The student team and the Collision Investigation Unit of the Ottawa Police will use the data to help with collision reconstruction and to improve bicycle safety. Between 2008 and 2012, there were 1,544 collisions involving cyclists with 1,238 injuries and 13 fatalities in Ottawa.
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Steven Reid
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Carleton University
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