Concrete median barriers are widely used in state highways to redirect vehicles from entering opposing travel lanes. Different from cable barriers or W-beam guardrails, concrete barriers are very rigid; therefore, their performance relies mainly on their cross-sectional shapes. With the development of high performance computer hardware and software, nonlinear crash simulations can be conducted to evaluate concrete barriers in addition to physical crash tests. This paper presents a reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) approach for the design of concrete barriers under vehicular crashes. This design optimization method combined nonlinear finite element (FE) analyses, a metamodeling technique, Monte Carlo simulations (MCS), and a genetic algorithm (GA). High-fidelity FE simulations were first performed to obtain the crash responses at the sample points; therefore, the performance of the concrete barrier was evaluated. To reduce computational efforts, metamodels were created and used to replace the implicit crash responses requiring expensive numerical simulations in the optimization solution process. Once the metamodels of constraint functions were created, the probability constraints were evaluated using a simulation method such as MCS. A GA was applied as the optimization engine of RBDO. The design of a concrete barrier (Jersey barrier) was studied and numerical results were obtained to demonstrate the RBDO approach.
Reliability Based Design Optimization of a MASH TL-3 Concrete Barrier
International Conference on Transportation and Development 2018 ; 2018 ; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
2018-07-12
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
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