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https://www.nationalacademies.org/trb/events

Automating the Lateral Strength Assessment of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Standard and Substandard Concrete Barriers

One of the important outcomes of the KTRAN: KSU-21-6 project that concluded in May 2023 is the development of a closed form procedure to assess the ultimate lateral strength of sub-standard concrete barriers using a rigorous yield line analysis beyond the prediction capabilities of the current American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) procedure. This method was confirmed by a truss analogy approach and finite element analysis. The closed form equations developed in that project were tedious to carry out by hand or Excel and the establishment of a computer software is deemed to be the most efficient and useful tool to add to the Kansas Department of Transportation (KsDOT)’s assessment capabilities. The findings of the earlier study revealed the fact that the lateral ultimate strength of sub-standard barriers exceed the current strength classification of AASHTO standard barriers leaving the geometrical height of the sub-standard barrier as the only deficiency to overcome in order to make such barriers as good as the standard barriers in mitigating truck crashes. Accordingly, the PI’s are proposing to develop a software package that implements a rigorous yield line analysis procedure incorporating the material-specific properties (steel and concrete) in determining the lateral ultimate strength of barriers. The software will be equally applicable to standard and sub-standard barrier assessments. It is expected to yield a powerful tool that can optimize the strength design of any concrete barrier. This is expected to lead to improvements in both the geometry, concrete and reinforcement properties in realizing an optimum target design. It will also allow examining various types of barrier designs to make the best educated engineering decisions on implementing one type over the other as well as coming up with new designs. The specific three main research tasks include: 1) Developing the lateral ultimate strength assessment software for standard and sub-standard barriers; 2) Generalizing the input parameters to explore new barrier geometries; 3) Writing and submitting the final project report and the developed comprehensive software.