Citation

Park KS, Noh MH, Lee J. Int. J. Crashworthiness 2014; 19(6): 624-638.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/13588265.2014.937558

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Many roadside safety features such as traffic barrier systems, end treatments, crash cushions, breakaway devices, truck-mounted attenuators, and other hardware are used to achieve the highest levels of highway safety. A goal of a highway safety feature is to provide a forgiving roadway and roadside that reduces the risk of a serious accident when a vehicle leaves the roadway. Among various evaluation methods, full-scale crash test has been and will continue to be the most common method of evaluating the impact performance of safety hardware, therefore there are many countries that have the full-scale crash test procedures and evaluation criteria including the US, EU, and South Korea.The recommended procedures for the full-scale crash test of safety hardware have been developed in the US starting from Highway Research Correlation Services Circular 482 in 1962. During the subsequent decade, the evolution of roadside safety concepts, technology, and practices necessitated an update to previous recommendations. In 2009, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) published Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) for the purpose of evaluating new safety hardware devices and this publication marks the first time that AASHTO has officially adopted crash-testing procedures for use in assessing roadside hardware. However, the evaluation of a bridge barrier in accordance with MASH has not been performed until 2012. Within the scope of this research, a bridge barrier system that meets the MASH criteria has been developed and evaluated, and the procedures and the results are described in this paper. The developed bridge barrier with the target safety level of TL4 is first designed using the plastic failure mechanism approach presented in AASHTO LRFD Design Specifications as a static manner and then the impact performance is pre-evaluated by the three-dimensional crash analysis software, LS-DYNA. Finally, the full-scale crash test is performed at Texas Transportation Institute for tests 4-10, 4-11, and 4-12 using 2005 Kia Rio passenger car, 2008 Dodge Ram pickup truck, and 1998 International 4700 single-unit truck, respectively. The full-scale crash test results meet the evaluation criteria presented in MASH, hence the developed bridge barrier in this research is ready for the field application.