JRC138075

Abstract

Security barriers are commonly used in the urban environments for protection against terrorist attacks using vehicles as a weapon and can be of very different types: bollards, street furniture, landscape, etc. The performance of such vehicle security barriers is typically conducted through the single impact of a test vehicle, according to the provisions of various standards and guidelines. Though, the high cost of such tests limits strongly the number of examined crash scenarios. Therefore, in order to assess a barrier’s performance for different configurations (e.g. impact speed and angle, site soil conditions, etc.) virtual testing through numerical simulations can be used. Additionally, the feedback of such virtual testing can be used to better prepare the experimental testing. Over the last decades, the automotive industry and research community has acquired significant experience from the use of numerical simulations for analysing vehicle crashes, where the main objective is, in general, the passenger’s safety. Since such a simulation focuses on a specific vehicle, its model is also specific and not necessary representative of other brands or models on the market. As a security barrier has to be performant for any vehicle brand, virtual testing would require an utilization of several brand specific numerical models. Therefore, in order to simply the process for virtual testing of security barriers, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre is currently developing “generic vehicle models”. These models are brand independent and are representative of a given vehicle category. In addition, they use many parameters that can be adjusted to fit any relevant practical configuration (e.g. in terms of the vehicle dimensions and mass distribution). So far, two generic vehicle models have been developed, one for the N1 category (small 3,5t truck according to the UNECE categories, see Figure 1) and the other covering categories from N2A to N3D (middle size trucks from 7t to 12t, see Figure 2). This communication presents the methodology of the model construction, its validation with respect to available experimental data and several sensitivity studies aiming at a better understanding of the influence of impact configuration (e.g. vehicle properties, impact velocity, soils conditions) of the performance of a security barrier.

Authors

MARKOVIC Damijan; SCHUMACHER Ralf; KARLOS Vasileios; LARCHER Martin;

Year

2024

Publisher

European Commission

Citation

MARKOVIC Damijan, SCHUMACHER Ralf, KARLOS Vasileios, LARCHER Martin, European Commission, 4th International Conference on Impact Loading of Structures and Materials (ICILSM)

Identifiers

JRC

JRC138075

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Generic vehicle models for simulating impacts on security barriers

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