Computational and Experimental Testing of the Steel Reinforced Wooden Road Safety Barrier

Computational simulations of steel reinforced wooden road safety barrier under vehicle impact conditions as mandated by the European standard EN 1317 were carried out in order to reduce the number of large scale crash tests needed to acquire the certificate, thus reducing the costs of the barrier development. Simulations were performed with the explicit finite element code LS-DYNA and they showed that the proposed barrier design is acceptable according to the standard. After successful experimental certification using a full scale crash test the results of the experiments also showed a very good agreement with the simulation. The comparison of the most important impact severity parameter ASI showed a difference of only 5 %. This shows that computer simulations can and should be used to develop and improve new road safety barrier designs.