Rollover crashworthiness analyses – an overview and state of the art

Rollover crashes are the most severe crash mode among all types of traffic crashes. They consist of sequential complex dynamic events with contributions of the vehicle, human, environmental elements, and their interactions. The aim of rollover crashworthiness analysis is to prevent or reduce the injury outcomes. Over the years, researchers have used a wide range of statistical, experimental and computational approaches to assess the impacts of those elements and their interactions on rollover outcomes. This article presents a review of the literature pertaining to rollover crashes. It is by no means a complete review of all rollover literature available; however, tries to cover many of the most frequently cited papers. In addition, due to the lack of available crashworthiness studies on commercial vehicles, this study focussed mainly on the research findings related to the passenger cars. In this review, rollover crash studies were characterised based on the Haddon matrix to provide a broad perspective on rollover crashworthiness status. First, the characteristics of rollover crashes were definedfrom the vehicle point of view. Second, the research findings were reviewed based on the following point of views: a vehicle (structural assessment), human (injury assessment), occupant protection systems (tools to control the interaction between occupants and vehicles) and environmental factors (road characteristics and road conditions). Third, based on research approaches, studies were classified into statistical (field data), experimental, and computational analyses. The recent development and findings of each method, were presented and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to address the rollover aspects were discussed. The available studies related to commercial vehicles were also presented in the separate section. Finally, reviewed papers were categorised based on research approaches and contributed rollover factors and opportunities for future research were discussed.