Effect of Soil Properties on Safety Performance of W-beam Guardrail

DOI

10.2991/amsee-16.2016.10How to use a DOI?

Keywords

crashworthiness; EN1317; LS-DYNA; W-beam guardrail

Abstract

W-beam guardrails are the most widely used road safety barriers worldwide. They are used for protecting vehicle occupants on dangerous areas of roadways. The ability of W-beam guardrails to absorb some of the crash energy reduces the risk of injury for vehicle occupants and limits deformation of impacting vehicles. Once the rail separates from the posts, the rail forms a redirection ribbon, guiding the vehicles away from the nearby hazard. Thus, the soil-post interaction in W-beam guardrails play a critical role in the manner in which errant vehicles interact with safety barriers. All road safety barriers used on European highways are designed according to the European standard EN 1317. This study applied the finite element code LS-DYNA for evaluating the safety performance of W-beam guardrail when the post rammed into various soil properties. Four crash test simulations were conducted for evaluating the crashworthiness of the W-beam guardrail according to European Standard EN 1317. The results have demonstrated that the soil properties does not affect the impact severity (ASI, THIV) but affects working width.

Copyright

© 2016, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Tso-Liang Teng
AU  - Cho-Chung Liang
AU  - Ching-Yu Hsu
AU  - Chien-Jong Shih
AU  - Thanh-Tung Tran
PY  - 2016/04
DA  - 2016/04
TI  - Effect of Soil Properties on Safety Performance of W-beam Guardrail
BT  - Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Advanced Materials Science and Environmental Engineering
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 34
EP  - 36
SN  - 2352-5401
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/amsee-16.2016.10
DO  - 10.2991/amsee-16.2016.10
ID  - Teng2016/04
ER  -