Improving the crashworthiness of reinforced wooden road safety barrier using simulations of pre-stressed bolt connections with failure

•A new type of steel reinforced wooden road safety barrier was designed.•A pre-stressed finite element bolt connection model with failure was developed.•The model was used for the failure analysis of the safety barrier bolt connections.•A novel and simplified model of the wooden road safety barrier is presented.•The road safety barrier was successfully certified in a large scale crash test.

During the development process of a new type of steel reinforced wooden road safety barrier parametric computational simulations were used to simulate the experimental vehicle impact certification tests as prescribed by the standard EN 1317. First a detailed study of pre-stressed bolt connection behavior between the guardrail and the guardrail connector was performed using parametric computational simulations of which results were later used in a large scale vehicle impact simulations. A novel, simplified approach to the modeling of barrier wooden parts was introduced to achieve reasonable simulation times in parametric study of the barrier behavior under vehicle impact. The wooden parts of the road safety barrier were modeled indirectly through a modified contact definition. The developed safety barrier design was later successfully experimentally certified in a full scale crash test according to the standard EN 1317. Experimental results were in a good agreement with the results of the full scale crash test simulations, which validates the proposed computational safety barrier model and thus justifies the use of the simplified modeling approach of the wooden safety barrier parts.