Collisions of Vehicles Running on Highway during an Earthquake

Abstract

Probability of large earthquake such as the coming Nankai-trough earthquake, Japan, is extremely high, therefore enough attentions should be paid to the occurrence of severe accidents of vehicles on highways. When such severe accidents actually occur, not only the damage of the accident itself but also the trouble of transportation route cause a delay of emergency response. The influence of earthquakes on running vehicles and the countermeasures to avoid such accidents have to be considered in advance. This study focused on seismic response analysis of highway vehicles during an earthquake. Previous studies pointed out that when an earthquake occurs, collisions occurs between vehicles. We here develop car-collision model on the result of experiment about vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-wall collisions. The model can express collisions with non-linear spring, and it can reproduce the experiment results accurately.