Development of simplified vehicle models for impact to barrier

The present thesis, made in collaboration with the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC), aims to investigate the reliability and improve the modeling of a N1 vehicle FEM model developed to test barriers for protection of public spaces. To these aims, two crash sensitivity analysis are conducted using a planar rigid barrier: influence of the angle of impact between vehicle and barrier, and influence of the position of a 1-ton mass placed on the flatbed of the model. While the impact angle has big influence on the exchanged forces and on the momentum, the position of the mass has minor effects. Then, the model is tested in an impact against a rigid bollard. First, the virtual model is compared with an experimental test of which only the video was available. Extracting the dimensions of the vehicle and of the bollard through reverse engineering, the FEM simulation was set to reproduce the real experiment. A comparison of the kinematic results and of the deformations showed a good correlation between the FEM model and the experimental test. This analysis demonstrated the reliability of the N1 model and its potential to test barriers for protection of public spaces. Lastly, the same vehicle and bollard have been used to test the influence of the position of the bollard and to compute reaction forces and moments of the bollard central impact.