OPTIMIZATION DESIGN OF NJ SHAPED GUARDRAIL BASED ON COLLISION SAFETY CONSIDERATION

Abstract

Cross-sectional shapes and dimensions of concrete guardrails directly influence climbing angles and directions of a car when a collision between concrete guardrail and car occurs. At the same time, contacting and climbing angles and directions influence the peak crushing force and the peak acceleration of a car body during a collision. Therefore, cross-sectional shapes and dimensions of concrete guardrails can influence the severity of injuries sustained when a collision between concrete guardrail and car occurs. In this study, the passive safety of a car body is considered in optimizing the cross-sectional dimensions of a New Jersey (NJ) concrete guardrail based on numerical simulations and surrogate model techniques. Optimal Latin hypercube design is used to get sampling points, and multi-island genetic algorithm is utilized to obtain the optimal size of NJ concrete guardrail in the optimization process. After simulating the collision between car and optimal NJ shaped guardrail, the results show that the peak acceleration of optimal results reduces significantly by 28% compared with the initial value, and the peak interface force decreases from 378.6 kN to 241.5 kN.