Standards Testing
| This section's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. |
Most motorcycle helmet standards use impacts at speeds between 4–7 m/s (9–16 mph). While motorcyclists frequently ride at speeds higher than 20 m/s (45 mph), the perpendicular impact speed of the helmet is usually not the same as the road speed of the motorcycle, and the severity of the impact is determined not only by the speed of the head but also by the surface it hits and the angle of impact. Since the surface of the road is almost parallel to the direction a motorcyclist moves while driving, only a small component of their velocity is directed perpendicularly (though other surfaces may be perpendicular to the motorcyclist's velocity, such as trees, walls, and the sides of other vehicles). The severity of an impact is also influenced by the nature of the surface struck. The sheet metal wall of a car door may bend inwards to a depth of 7.5–10 cm (3.0–3.9 in) during a helmeted-head impact, allowing more stopping distance for the rider's head than the helmet itself. A perpendicular impact against a flat steel anvil at 5 m/s (11 mph) may be of approximate severity to an oblique impact against a concrete surface at 30 m/s (67 mph) or a perpendicular impact against a sheet metal car door or windscreen at 30 m/s. Since there is a wide range of severity in the impacts that could happen in a motorcycle accident, some will be more severe than the impacts used in the standard tests and some will be less.
Read more about this topic: Motorcycle Helmet
Famous quotes containing the words standards and/or testing:
“The standards of His Majesty’s taste made all those ladies who aspired to his favour, and who were near the Statutable size, strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival and bulk and dignity of the ox. Some succeeded, and others burst.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Bourbon’s the only drink. You can take all that champagne stuff and pour it down the English Channel. Well, why wait 80 years before you can drink the stuff? Great vineyards, huge barrels aging forever, poor little old monks running around testing it, just so some woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma can say it tickles her nose.”
—John Michael Hayes (b.1919)