Renelius Bell

Monitoring the State of Digital Cameras During Vehicle Crash Testing: an Adventure in Instrumentation Development Renelius Bell

For years the automotive industry has used video to perform structural analysis and the passenger?s reaction during a vehicular collision. It has also been used as a data collection tool, for proving that a vehicle meets government crash standards across the world (FMVSS, European, Japanese TRIAS, IIHS, NCAP/LINCAP). The introduction of new High Speed High Resolution Digital Cameras to be used for kinematics too collect data has created new problems and challenges. The lack of properly detecting camera failures, in a timely manner, can cause any company that is using this equipment to lose critical test property at times. Lost camera data can force crash test to be ran a second test. This has the potential to delay the launch of a vehicle, and it can cost companies an estimated $50K - $500K in man hours and test properties. That price does not include lost sales, due to the late vehicle launch of a highly anticipated vehicle. The development of the Digital Imaging State of Health (DISOH) Monitoring System will dramatically decrease the possibility of companies losing test data and assist in a program launch timing.