Development Of The "Sandwich" Guardrail Based On Crash Simulation And Test

In recent years, with the total number of motor vehicles and highway mileageexpanse continuously in our country, traffic accidents that happen on thehighway are increasing year by year and result in a large number of casualty andproperty losses. Among them nearly1/3accidents are due to the impact betweenvehicles and guardrails. And considering the shortcoming of the current highwayguardrail such as high cost, easy to corrosion and so on, the research of theimpact between vehicles and guardrails and design a new practical guardrail havemany realistic meanings．Based on the traditional guardrail made of steel, in this paper a new guardrail wasdesigned, which use composite materials and adopt the “Sandwich” structure whichimprove the crashworthiness. The composite materials decide the advantages of lowcost, hard to corrosion, and easy production and the guardrail crashworthiness can beadjusted by through adding or reducing the sandwich structure. A sample trial wasconducted; the guardrail system program was optimized with the simulation test andthe full scale real vehicle crash tests were conducted to study its protective effect.In this paper, the laboratory component dynamic tests, full scale real vehicle crashtests and the simulation tests was combined to research and design the new guardrail.First, the initial parameters and point crashworthiness of the new guardrail wasconducted through verify the crashworthiness of the key guardrail plate using thelaboratory component dynamic tests. Then the vehicle-guardrail FE simulation modelwas built with the software of LS-DYNA and HYPERMESH. Three parameters of theguardrail height, the mezzanine numbers and the vehicle front chamfer was optimizedby full factorial simulation tests to find the optimal solution of improving the guardrailsystem, and then the optimized solution was applied to the real vehicle crash tests. Thesimulation and the real vehicle crash tests shows that the optimized semi-rigid highwayguardrail based on composite materials and the “Sandwich” structure has sufficientcrashworthiness and occupant protection capabilities to meet the relevant regulatoryrequirements.The results of this paper indicated that the new guardrail could meet the basicprotection requirements and has overcome the shortcoming of conventional guardrail,which had reference value on the selection of highway guardrail and further research and development.