Investigation of Roadside Barrier Concept to Mitigate Motorcycle Injury in Upright Impact

Over the past years, extensive research efforts have been made to improve roadside safety hardware to reduce injury to occupants for passenger vehicles and heavy trucks. Although some European Countries have led significant research to address motorcycle riders’ safety when impacting roadside safety devices in a sliding position, still very limited investigation has been conducted to address motorcycle riders’ safety when impacting roadside hardware in an upright position. Currently, no standards have been developed requiring crash testing of upright motorcycles impacting roadside barriers. Therefore, roadside barriers might be ideal to contain and safely re-direct vehicles, but they are currently not designed to be forgiving when impacted by upright motorcycles and their riders. While full-scale crash tests are necessary to ultimately evaluate the crashworthiness of a system, and any interaction between the system and the rider, they can also be very expensive. Finite element computer simulations are a useful tool to assist with the design of roadside safety hardware and with their crashworthiness evaluation. A new motorcycle-friendly barrier concept was investigated to prevent severe injury with upright motorcycle impacts against concrete barriers. Impact simulations were conducted and the behavior of the motorcycle and rider were analyzed along with injury criteria.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF30 Standing Committee on Motorcycles and Mopeds.
• Authors:
  • Schulz, Nathan D
  • Dobrovolny, Chiara Silvestri
  • DeFranco, Antonio
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Photos; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Barriers (Roads); Crash injuries; Crashworthiness; Finite element method; Highway safety; Motorcycle crashes; Motorcycles; Simulation
• Subject Areas: Highways; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01663101
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-06656
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 20 2018 5:08PM