Optimization design of corrugated beam guardrail based on RBF-MQ surrogate model and collision safety consideration

•Multiobjective optimization design was made for two corrugated beam guardrails.•RBF surrogate model based on collision safety consideration was used for regression analysis.•Comparative studies were made between W-beam guardrail and Thrie-beam guardrail.

As the main safety facility on the highway, a guardrail system is very essential for the highway traffics safety. In this paper, the Finite Element (FE) models of the vehicle and the corrugated beam guardrail system were created. Two types of widely used corrugated beam semi-rigid guardrails were simulated, which were the W-beam guardrail and the Thrie-beam guardrail. The collision between the corrugated beam guardrail systems and the vehicle body was analyzed. In the collision process, the snagging effect of the post to the vehicle body was also concerned. Under the considerations of the collision safety and the mechanism of the snagging effect, the multiobjective optimization problem was defined with dimensional sizes of guardrails to be the design variables. And the radial basis function (RBF) was applied to construct the regression models of the analytical objective, which increased the accuracy of fitting. The Pareto set and the optimal solution were obtained. After the optimization design, the W-beam guardrail and Thrie-beam guardrail were both greatly improved, that increased the collision safety between the corrugated beam guardrail and the vehicle body. This kind of analytical method can also be used for the crashworthiness optimization between any other cars and guardrails.