Application of multibody dynamics for simulating vehicle impacts on steel safety guardrails

摘要

The new European Code EN 1317, which is obligatory for members of the European Union since 1999, uses various criteria such as containment level, impact severity level and levels of working width to classify the severity of vehicle impact on safety barriers according to the required level of protection. One of the tasks of a recent study at the Institute of Steel Construction was to optimise the operation of existing road vehicle restraint systems and to categorise their performance for certification according to the severity classes as stated in EN 1317. Using the method of multibody dynamics a computer model of a typical steel guardrail system currently used in Germany was developed. Several impact scenarios were analysed in the time history domain, and numerical results were compared to experimental crash data with a good overall agreement.