Development of simplified vehicle models for barrier impact

The scope of this thesis is the development of a generic vehicle model that will be used in the validation of the design of barriers for terrorist attack mitigation. More specifically, to simulate impacts of vehicles on barrier that will access the resistance of a given barrier, which is going to be used in city centres, in order to protect specific areas that could be considered as potential targets for terrorist attacks. The model this thesis studies refers to a vehicle of the category N1 according to the standard IWA 14. It is designed by SVS FEM and co-developed in collaboration with the European Commission Joint Research Centre and Politecnico Di Torino. The model targets to be designed to be simple enough for the reduction computational cost, parametrizable to easily modify the dimensions of the model within the N1 and to be code independent in order for the results of the simulations are not affected by the solver used by the user. Literature studies have been conducted on the barrier design and the comparison between the two solvers, LS-Dyna which is the main tool for developing the model and Europlexus, a solver developed in-house and used by the Joint Research Centre. The initial task of the thesis is to perform a verification of the model developed by SVS to access the model’s stability and proper operation. The next task is to perform a code comparison between the two solvers by performing sensitivity analysis on different parameters on parts extracted from the N1 vehicle model, with increasing complexity so as to achieve efficient numerical modelling by identifying crucial components and eliminating unnecessary parameters.