Study of Shock Attenuation for Impacted Safety Barriers

Abstract

Romania is increasing and modernizing its highway network to manage the new transportation system as a result of the development of its economy. It is consequently important that the roads system should be efficiently responsible to the standard traffic requirements. Every safety barrier producer must have an investigation report, known as crash-test. Protective guardrails have as most important aim the redirection of the vehicles on the roadway, ensuring directing pedestrians and other road users. Safety barriers are situated on hazardous road sections in terms of traffic security, to keep vehicles on roadway. Crash-tests are quite expensive and given that they have need of specialized services and qualified personnel, the result is that important decisions are quite often based on the results of a few full-scale impact tests. At present, worldwide, protective guard rails are manufactured in different geometric configurations, depending on different fixing modes in soil, in order to enlarge impact strength capacity for different types of collisions. In this paper, the authors propose and analyze the impact behavior of two new safety guardrail systems in order to raise the impact energy absorption. The tests were performed using as impact or a 1500kg Chevrolet C1500 pick-up truck from the NCAC models library.