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| Corus develops new roadside steel restraint system The UK-Dutch steel giant Corus has now developed a new family of roadside restraint systems called Protect 365 that it believes, if adopted, will significantly contribute to improved road safety. Each year there are around 3,200 deaths on UK roads and over 310,000 serious injuries, of which 65 per cent can be attributed to human error. Protect 365 products, which have now been given formal accreditation by the Highways Agency, go far beyond the minimum requirements of the European standard (EN1317) for highways road restraint safety systems. A major discovery occurred when Corus automotive engineers working on the development of Protect 365 products evaluated a set of impact test results and saw that the Head Impact Criteria (HIC) was far too severe. Although HIC measurements are a recognised automotive industry benchmark used by OEMs, it is not a test criteria currently used in the European standard to define crash barrier safety performance levels. Using fully instrumented crash dummies, Corus tests showed that during impact speeds exceeding 110Km/h, occupants heads could come through the vehicle side window and strike the barrier. The resulting simulated HIC value of 2300 in this scenario was well over twice the 1000 value targeted by vehicle manufacturers for vehicle development, and would almost certainly equate to serious injury or even death. As a result of these tests, Corus needed to modify the design of Protect 365 to include a unique 'step' in the barrier profile shape in order to eliminate this effect and prevent head impact occurring. Another Corus challenge to the EN1317 standard, related to the size of vehicles tested against the barrier system. The standard requires manufacturers to test how a barrier performs against the heaviest vehicle within a system class, for example a 30 tonne truck, and then test against a 900kg small car to check impact severity. Corus discovered that when a 1,500kg car crashed against its barrier design, the increased impact energy caused more deformation of the barrier mounting brackets, potentially leading to unacceptably high levels of severity in the vehicle passenger cell, so making the system unsafe. As a result of these tests, Corus re-designed its barrier to include an energy absorbing arrangement resulting in a more controlled and progressive deformation leading to acceptable severity levels for both small and mid-range cars. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Construction News :: home page |