Adequacy of Manitoba concrete bridge rail during truck platoon impacts and associated occupant risks

Abstract

Platooning is an extension of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) and forward collision avoidance technology; it allows lateral and longitudinal control of vehicles while they move in tight formations. Platooning is ideal for trucks as they usually travel long distances in highways as a group. It is necessary to understand if the existing roadside safety devices are adequate to resist the consecutive impacts at high speed that can occur due to errant truck platoons. It is also important to analyze the associated occupant risks during such impact events. A detailed analysis of the capacity and adequacy of Manitoba Concrete Bridge Rail using computer simulations, under Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) Test Level 5 (TL5) criteria, is presented in this study. The study briefly discusses the methodology to run multiple impact computer simulations in LS-DYNA. The impact of the leading truck is validated using the known data from a full-scale crash test; then, the impact events involving the following trucks are simulated to understand the additional capacity of the roadside barrier. To assess the occupant risk, the flail space model (FSM) concept is utilised as per MASH criteria. Simulation results imply that catastrophic barrier failure and major injuries to the occupants are unlikely to occur during the truck platoon impact.

Keywords:

• Truck platooning
• concrete barrier
• bridge rail
• MASH
• impact simulation
• roadside safety

Acknowledgment

This paper is supported by the Safety through Disruption (Safe-D) University Transportation Center (UTC). Portions of this research were conducted with high performance research computing resources provided by Texas A&M University (https://hprc.tamu.edu).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).