ABSTRACT Roadside barriers of various designs are extensively used for the purpose of shielding obstacles along the road from impact with errant vehicles. One commonly applied roadside barrier system is a cable system, consisting of three steel cables supported by weak steel posts. Due to an increase in the use of cable systems, a tangent to the roadway, as opposed to flared away from the roadway, crashworthy end terminal has been designed by the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility. The design goal was to effectively disengage the pre-tensioned cables at the end anchor point when impacted on the end by a vehicle, allowing the vehicle to pass through the system virtually unobstructed. It is the objective of this study to help evaluate the new design through bogie testing and nonlinear finite element analysis using LS-DYNA. Based on bogie test results and detailed analysis of the simulation results, it was concluded that the new cable end terminal was ready for full-scale crash testing. INTRODUCTION Roadside barriers of various designs are extensively used for the purpose of shielding obstacles along the road from impact with errant vehicles. One commonly applied roadside barrier system is the 3-strand cable system. This system consists of three steel cables supported by weak steel posts. The steel cables are pre-tensioned with a specified initial load, and are anchored at both ends of the system. When an errant vehicle obliquely impacts the 3-strand cable system, sufficient tension is developed within the cables to redirect the vehicle, effectively shielding the roadside hazard and increasing the safety of the vehicle operator. The weak steel posts supporting the cables offer very little resistance to the impacting vehicle. Due to the likelihood of a longitudinal impact with the end of the 3-strand cable system, a crashworthy end terminal has been designed by the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility (MwRSF). The design goal was to effectively disengage the pre-tensioned cables at the end anchor point upon impact with a vehicle, allowing the vehicle to pass through the system virtually unobstructed. To assist in the development of the 3-strand cable system end terminal, the CTB-4 bogie crash test was conducted. It is the objective of this study to simulate the cable terminal bogie test CTB-4 using LS-DYNA, a nonlinear finite element analysis code (1), and validate the simulation results with that of the physical test
