Woodrail Road Barrier Impact Analysis

The Woodrail^® road barrier is designed to improve vehicle safety blending in with the surrounding environment.

ABSTRACT

The Woodrail^® road barrier is designed to improve vehicle safety blending in with the surrounding environment. The barrier has been thoroughly tested and certified against car and bus impact conditions. Since road barriers are built to improve safety of larger road vehicles, they are potentially very dangerous for motorcyclists. For this reason, Woodrail designed a protection system to explicitly account for impact of a human sliding on the road surface and hitting the road barrier; the system can be easily integrated with an existing barrier.

Impact Analysis using Numerical Simulation

Woodrail needed to test the road barrier with the motorcyclist protection system installed for:

• car and bus impact conditions
• the consequences of a human impact on the modified road barrier

EnginSoft  provided consultancy in extending the certification of the barrier to the new configuration with the motorcyclist protection system installed. This was efficiently achieved using numerical simulation with a significant cost reduction compared to physical testing. The study included:

• simulation of car and bus impact scenarios
• an adapted numerical dummy model provides biometric results including head acceleration and neck moments

Although the simulations were quite demanding from a computational standpoint we ran them within hours exploiting the EnginSoft Cluster and other in-house high performance computing resources.

Thanks to the results obtained through this study, the Woordrail safety barrier was approved as a Level I protection system for motorcyclists following the UNE135900 code.