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Evaluation of Surface Mounted Median Guardrail

Concrete median barriers are very commonly used in areas that have high Average Daily Traffic (ADT) or where there is higher chance of vehicle intruding into opposing lanes due to curves or other geometric features. Concrete barriers are generally expensive to construct and a metal rail median guardrail has the potential to reduce this cost. In a lot of urban and high traffic volume roadways, a median with soil is not available. This limits the use of existing guardrail systems since they require metal posts that are embedded in soil. The research team’s approach aims to develop a metal rail median guardrail that can be mounted directly on concrete pavement. Such a design will allow TxDOT to protect opposing traffic in a lot of areas where it was previously cost prohibitive to do so with concrete median barriers. The research team will develop a concept of surface mounted guardrail that will meet the Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) testing requirements for Test Level (TL) 3. The research team will mature this concept through a series of component level dynamic impact testing and finite element (FE) simulation. The research team will develop a full system model of the guardrail and perform vehicle impact simulations to determine the likelihood of the design to meet MASH testing requirements. As a final step, the research team will conduct MASH Test 3-11 and Test 3-10 with a pickup truck and a small passenger car, respectively, to verify the performance of the new surface mounted guardrail design.

Language

  • English

Project

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01744079
  • Record Type: Research project
  • Source Agency: Texas Department of Transportation
  • Contract Numbers: 0-7052
  • Files: RIP, STATEDOT
  • Created Date: Jun 25 2020 12:26PM