Pendulum Simulation of Vehicular Impact on Retrofit Bridge Barriers

The purpose of Research Project 0-4823 is to investigate how to replace a standard TxDOT bridge barrier after the original has been damaged by a vehicular collision. Post-installed mechanical anchors are a popular way to fasten structural members to hardened concrete and may be used for retrofit bridge barrier connection designs. The primary criterion for retrofit bridge barrier designs is that they perform similar to corresponding cast-in-place bridge barriers.

To understand how a standard cast-in-place T203 bridge barrier behaves during a vehicular impact, an impact test pendulum and a T203 bridge deck and barrier test specimen were developed and constructed at UT Austin’s Ferguson Structural Engineering Laboratory (FSEL). The impact test pendulum currently serves as valuable tool for simulating the load history of a vehicular impact consistent with TL-3 testing criteria of NCHRP Report 350.

To validate the impact test pendulum, impact acceleration histories from rigid-barrier impact tests were compared with results from the crash test of a 1997 Geo Metro and finite-element analytical models using LS-DYNA, a widely used software package.