Research on the road safety barrier on rural highways

摘要

To improve the guardrail safety on rural highways of China, a new hybrid guardrail comprised concrete and box girder was proposed, and the crashworthiness of the hybrid barrier was analyzed using finite element method. Firstly, the finite element models of bus and barrier were developed and validated by using collision test results. In addition, the explicit dynamic finite element software LS-DYNA was used to simulate the collision between vehicle and the guardrail considering materials as well as the nonlinear performance of the boundary conditions. The computational results show that the hybrid barrier could effectively block and redirect the bus in the collision. Meanwhile, the maximum lateral deformation of the guardrail is well below the safety limit. The method could be applied to design and evaluate new road safety protection faculties on rural highways.