New method to measure abrasion of motorcyclist protective clothing

Abstract

Motorcyclists often suffer severe injuries in accidents, especially at high temperatures when wearing thinner garments. Producing adequate protective clothing for them is therefore of great importance. Nevertheless, typical test procedures for protective clothing often cannot represent a real accident situation and scientific literature about this topic is scarce. Thus, in our project, a simple, inexpensive and realistic test setup was created. Experiments revealed significant differences between typical motorcycle protective clothing materials under examination, indicating that especially those produced from man-made fibres can lead to burns and worse injuries of motorcyclists, while some relatively inexpensive materials showed surprisingly high abrasion resistance. More importantly, the test results partly differ from those performed with one of the standard testing devices, implying the importance of future tests to compare different testing procedures with the results of real accidents.