Abstract
Abstract
The paper describes the analysis of steel road restraint system, which is currently in use on European public roads. Observations of installed systems indicate that the current road restraint system design is far too stiff, which results in unacceptable decelerations during the vehicle impact. The global stiffness of the restraint system in the initial phase of an impact is largely attributed to the distance spacer design.
The purpose of this research is to improve the currently road restraint system design by means of computational simulations. The impact severity and stiffness of current and new design have been evaluated with dynamic nonlinear elasto-plastic analysis of a three-dimensional road restraint system within the framework of the finite element method with LS-DYNA code. Computational simulations were verified with full scale crash tests.
Computational analyses prove that the currently used road restraint system is impropriate and that the new road restraint system design assures controllable elasto-plastic deformation and crash energy absorption which in turn decreases the decelerations of an impact vehicle and consequently increases the safety of vehicle passengers.