Development of a HGV FEM for road safety analysis

In the last years roadside safety design, in particular for passive systems, was greatly improved with the possibility to use computational mechanics. Computational mechanics is based on the use of complex finite element codes, that allows the virtual reproduction of real world problems. Regarding roadside safety, the design phase was, until now, based on the use of simplified analysis, unable to describe accurately the complexity of vehicle impacts against safety hardware. To build a FE model for an impact problem many elements are necessary: • Model geometry. • Constitutive laws of the materials. • Links (rigid, cinematic, etc.) between bodies or part of them. • Definition and characterization of contact surfaces. This set of information is needed for each different body involved in the event; making the development of a complete model very much demanding, but once a part (subset) of the entire model has been accurately validated by the comparison with real experimental data, it can be used again and again in other analogous models. Our goal was to build and validate a FE model of a Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV). We chose this kind of vehicle because it wasn't available and because it was useful to test the containment of the barriers, and to study the dynamic interactions between vehicle and road pavement. In particular, this vehicle can be used to test the safety barriers according to EN 1317 standard, for the H4a class of containment. It reproduces a FIAT-IVECO F180 truck, a vehicle with 4 axles and a mass of 10.5 ton (30 with the full load). The model (12337 elements and 11470 nodes) was built for and is ready to use with LS Dyna FE code from Livermore Software Technology Corporation.