Analyzing Highway Median Safety Through Vehicle Dynamics Simulations
Open Access
- Author:
- Stine, Jason S.
- Graduate Program:
- Mechanical Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- July 28, 2009
- Committee Members:
- Sean Brennan, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Sean N Brennan, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- Vehicle dynamics
Median safety
Vehicle rollover
Cross-median collisions - Abstract:
- This thesis presents an analysis of highway median safety through the use of dynamic simulations of vehicles. The commercially available software CarSim® was used to simulate several thousand off-road median incursions. Various contributing factors, including median cross-section geometry, vehicle type, and driver intervention, and their respective influence on accident causation, were investigated. The results from the simulations presented in this work offer design guidance for highway engineers. The simulations indicate that overall safety of a median depends on the occurrence of both vehicle rollover and median crossover incidents. Based on this data, as the design engineer develops a new median, they can optimize a particular median geometry to prevent rollover or crossover events. Further results provide bumper height traces which allow engineers to design barriers at specific heights and at particular offsets within the median to maximize safety in the event of an off-road excursion. To validate the simulation, vehicle trajectories from previous full-scale experimental crash tests, provided by The Texas Transportation Institute, were considered. Further verification of the aggregate simulation results was carried out by comparing them to statistical data from both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Traffic Safety Facts and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program Project 22-21. Both validation efforts produced strong agreement between the simulation results and the real-life crash data.