Cost-Effective Structural Anti-Ram Security Barriers: New Design, Computer Modeling and Test Validation

Abstract

Terrorist attacks became a major threat to the safety, security, and economy of our nation in the last few years. The Attacks against important facilities could have different techniques; however the main source of ground attacks is the application of excessive amount of energy to the designated facility through a vehicle intrusion and/or a blast. In the current research, a new approach of using steel-structure barriers is presented. Several new structural anti-ramming barriers are designed and analyzed using nonlinear Finite Element Analysis (FEA). In this new design, commercial steel-structural components were used in order to reduce the manufacturing cost. These new steel-structure security devices have proven an excellent capability to sustain severe impacts by spreading substantial amount of the impact energy throughout the entire structure and the supporting soil/concrete. In the current research, three anti-ramming bollard systems, for K4, K8 and K12 impact conditions, were presented. The bollard systems were made of commercial steel unites connected together to produce the entire bollard structure. The FE modeling and simulation results of the bollard systems were presented in details in this paper. The FEA for the K4 bollard was validated by comparing the simulation results with the actual test results. The FE simulation results correlated very well with the actual test results. The steel-structure barriers could have much less shallow foundation to account for the in-city utility restrictions. It also has the advantage of easier and faster installation minimizing the required digging and installation time inside the city. The design could also be modified to account for different threat levels and different sites’ restrictions.