Improvement of Portable Concrete Barrier Design Using Computational Mechanics

Abstract

Concrete safety barriers have been employed broadly in Italy since the 1980s, particularly on highways and freeways. Safety barrier homologation and design standards have not yet precisely determined specific fields of application or modality of installation, in particular for concrete barriers. Such barriers have sometimes been judged too rigid and, therefore, inadequate to pass crash tests conducted with lightweight vehicles. No changes have been made nor have new designs (crosssection shape and size) been developed in the past 20 years. For all those reasons, the possibility of achieving better overall performance with concrete barriers has been investigated (containment of heavy vehicles and lower accelerations on occupants of lightweight vehicles). One design proposal for these modular systems is to use lightweight concrete and make the element shorter than the one that is usually adopted in Italy. In that way, the higher lateral deformability of the barrier could lead to a greater dissipation of ene...