Experimental and numerical comparative crashworthiness analysis of innovative renewable hybrid barrier with conventional roadside barriers

Abstract

Guardrails are passive safety elements used in roadside safety. They are commonly manufactured as steel and concrete. There are also guardrail systems in which wood and steel materials are used together. This study investigated the crashworthiness performance of a newly developed F-shape type renewable hybrid barrier (RHB) system consisting of wood, steel and sand components. Commonly used steel guardrail and F-shape type concrete barrier were used for performance comparison. For this, a pendulum impactor has been set up. The impact performances of the aforementioned guardrails in the pendulum assembly were determined, then tests were carried out by modelling the pendulum system in the LS-DYNA environment for full-size crash testing and calibration. Calibration and validation were performed by comparing the Finite Element (FE) results with the pendulum results. Then, to determine the crashworthiness and safety of RHBs and compare them with steel and concrete barriers, full-size finite element models were created in the TB11 test standard specified in the European roadside safety standard - EN1317. As a result of the analysis, while providing the comfort of a concrete barrier after impact, RHBs perform close to the steel barrier in terms of safety. This study will be the first step before the prospective full-scale crash analysis.