Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, 323 Leonhard Building, University Park, PA 16802, United States.
Accid Anal Prev. 2010 Nov;42(6):1769-77. doi: 10.1016/j.aap.2010.04.018. Epub 2010 Jun 17.
Although vehicle dynamics simulations have long been used in vehicle design and crash reconstruction, their use for highway design is rare. This paper investigates the safety of highway medians through iterative simulations of off-road median encroachments. The commercially available software CarSim was used to simulate over one hundred thousand encroachments, representing the entire passenger vehicle fleet and a wide range of encroachment angles, departure speeds, steering inputs, and braking inputs. Each individual simulation output was then weighted using data from previous studies to reflect the probability of each specific accident scenario occurring in a real-life median encroachment. Results of this analysis illustrate the relative influence of median cross-section geometry on the resulting accident outcomes. The simulations indicate that the overall safety of a highway median depends on the occurrence of both vehicle rollover and median crossover events, and the cross-section shape, slope, and width are all shown to greatly affect each of these incidents. An evaluation of the simulation results was conducted with vehicle trajectories from previous experimental crash tests. Further assessment of the aggregate simulation results to actual crash data was achieved through comparison with several databases of crash statistics. Both efforts showed a strong agreement between the simulations and the real-life crash data.
尽管车辆动力学模拟在车辆设计和事故重建中已经得到了广泛应用，但在公路设计中的应用却很少。本文通过对偏离道路中央分隔带的反复模拟，研究了公路中央分隔带的安全性。本文使用了商用软件 CarSim 来模拟超过 10 万次的偏离，涵盖了整个乘用车车队以及各种偏离角度、偏离速度、转向输入和制动输入。然后，根据以往研究的数据，对每个单独的模拟输出进行加权，以反映在现实生活中偏离道路中央分隔带时每种特定事故场景发生的概率。这项分析的结果说明了中央分隔带横截面几何形状对事故结果的相对影响。模拟结果表明，公路中央分隔带的整体安全性取决于车辆侧翻和中央分隔带交叉事件的发生，以及横截面的形状、坡度和宽度都极大地影响了这两种情况。对来自以前的实验碰撞测试的车辆轨迹进行了对模拟结果的评估。通过与几个碰撞统计数据库进行比较，实现了对综合模拟结果与实际碰撞数据的进一步评估。这两项工作都表明了模拟结果与现实生活中的碰撞数据之间的高度一致性。
