We trust our cars to get us from A to B without injury. That faith, however, is rather blind, considering the number of accidents that occur every year.
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), 42,514 Americans died in car accidents in 2022. Though the death toll is certainly the most pressing and tragic component of such crashes, the economic toll is not a light one either, totaling $340 billion annually, according to the most recent estimates.
As if that's not enough, automakers and suppliers paid $11.8 billion in costs related to recalls in the U.S. alone in 2016. These figures are simply unacceptable, but there's something we can do about them.
Increase the use of sensors in impact testing. Real-time sensor-based data can refine the picture of what's happening during a high-speed impact, offer additional information for prototyping and testing, and save lives.
Impact testing began 90 years ago when General Motors rammed a vehicle into a concrete barrier. Since then, car makers and independent researchers worldwide have tested cars and trucks of every stripe, sussing out safety insufficiencies inside and outside the vehicle.
Today, real-world impact testing is critical to prototyping any consumer product. It helps identify flaws in the design, optimize materials use, and improve performance. It also increases a vehicle's ergonomics and life-and-death safety features.
In other words, it's irreplaceable, and the more data you can glean from each test, the better.
But crash testing, like any technology, is far from a monolith. There are many different ways to go about it, and the nature of testing constantly changes. New materials, vehicle prototypes, and testing scenarios necessitate constant updates to ensure you're catching every particle of data you can.
What is the secret to extremely granular crash test data? The pressure sensor, of course.
It's hard to see what's happening during a crash, even when you slow a video to individual frames. You still can't measure the force exerted by one object on another using traditional methods alone. You need data.
The High-Speed (HS) Impact System from XSENSOR provides the detail you need before, during, and after impact tests, offering unprecedented refinement in surface pressure measurements.
Using such a system, which combines software and hardware in one place, you can now record and analyze how different products perform throughout the impact. That could include the car's body, other external features, internal surfaces, and restraint systems. Sensor data can now measure any system implicated in a crash.
Pressure sensors can play a huge role in improving vehicle safety through impact testing. In conjunction with your other testing, XSENSOR'S sensors offer accurate, high-speed, consistent measurement of all impact forces acting upon a certain surface. In a vehicle, this can mean any number of things, such as:
XSENSOR's high-speed sensors offer all this and more using a sensor mat. The mat contains thousands of unique sensors capable of independently measuring force and transmitting that data in real-time. The data is packaged in minute increments (at thousands frames per second) that help you build the most comprehensive picture of an accident.
Moreover, these sensors can withstand the huge forces that come into play during an impact scenario, so you can use them repeatedly without recalibration or resetting. This dramatically increases their usefulness in crash test applications. Indeed, calibration stability will lead to more consistent data over a longer period.
Additional benefits of the XSENSOR package include:
With such benefits, your engineering or testing team will never have to worry about the accuracy and validity of your data again.
The High-Speed (HS) Impact system from XSENSOR combines the most cutting-edge developments in sensing technology with high-performing software to bring you an all-in-one system. Never again will you have to wrestle with integrating software and hardware; now, you can pull both right out of the box and get to work.
Our comprehensive system can help you capture impact data from surfaces and passive and active restraints during crash tests. It is a truly game-changing approach to measuring pressure at high resolutions and speeds, and one that we desperately need, given the number of deaths currently occurring on America's roadways.
You can use the system alone or in combination with your current testing systems as an extra layer of data. The key point is that you use it because life may depend on the outcome.
If you're ready to learn more about XSESNOR technology, our team is ready to help. Book your demo today.