Newton's Law and How Engineers are Utilizing it to Reduce Fatality in Accidents

Around the world, people take billions of car trips and among those car trips, there are thousands of crashes of which some will lead to loss of life while others will lead to severe injuries and it is because of these accident, car manufacturers continue to find new ways to prevent fatal outcomes from them. Even though the crashes that lead to death is low compared to the number of driving we do daily.

Compared to about 100 years ago, when people who encountered a car accident were 20 times likely to die, it isn't the same today. This success is thanks to the developments made by engineers to ensure the safety of cars when there is an accident, and this is done by studying the physics that happens when these violent crashes occur.

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The majority of frontal crash fatality happens because the car goes from whatever speed at miles per hour to zero once it hits a barrier or an obstacle. engineers have been working on how to ensure that cars don't go to zero immediately so as to cushion the impact. of the accident. Being able to control what happens between the period of the crash and stop matters a lot in the survival of people.

Another thing that engineers also consider is the force the body experience which is dependent directly on the time the car take to stop. With frontal accident, the car can go from 100km/hr to zero in a blink of an eye which is extremely fast. So in other for the passengers as well as the driver to be safe, extending the time taken to crash on to zero can help.

With Newton's first law of motion which says an object will remain in motion at a constant speed in a straight line unless an external force is applied to it which is what we refer to as inertia. A car crash isn't all about the car alone being affected, it is also the body, the organs in your body, and everything inside the car. Wait, before we continue, let's state clearly that external forces could be the hand brake, leg brake, another car, wall, and other things but while your brake might be a little slow, the stop from an accident can be very fast. This is because the amount of force is different and this is why your head do not go to and fro giving you a whiplash from stopping in a traffic red light.

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The force difference moves us to Newton's second law that says that the magnitude of the force that it takes to stop an object in motion is dependent on two things; the mass of the object, and its acceleration. That F = m a formula is the deal and acceleration is deceleration as the case may be in the case of an accident is the change in velocity over time.

In an accident, while engineers do not have any control on the mass, and change in velocity, they have a little control over the time taken for the car to stop. The smaller the force, the longer the time while the bigger the force, the shorter the time taken to stop. In other to reduce the time for the car to stop, car manufacturers stopped using metals which were used to build cars making them steady but they were going to crash and not reduce the time of stop but they noticed that with cars whose ends will crumble, it means the deceleration time will reduce also reducing the force impact on the car which means that in the case of an accident, the car would crash but the people in it might survive.

Read More

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811766
https://www.iihs.org/about
https://ekinsurance.com/newtons-three-laws-of-motion-in-car-crashes/
https://physicsworld.com/a/using-newtons-laws-to-weed-out-bogus-car-crash-claims/