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Executive Summary
This site documents the work on the development and optimization of Finite Element Method (FEM) models of tractor-semitrailers for simulation of crash events involving roadside safety hardware such as bridge rails and median barriers. The site contains interactive manuals and documentation for the developed models. The research team of Battelle Memorial Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UTK) was sponsored by National Transportation Research Center Inc. (NTRCI)
The tractor-semitrailer vehicle FEM models developed in this project are currently the most advanced publicly available models of this vehicle class in terms of physical function, geometric detail and material property accuracy. The models are computationally very robust given their complexity. The models have been extensively debugged and used for hundreds of simulations for the cases within the range of NCHRP Report 350 TL-5 speeds and impact angles and have shown to be reasonably accurate. This website was developed with a goal to make these models widely available to the engineering community for design and development of roadside safety hardware and for an overall improvement of public safety.
Reports for each year of the project can be found in Download section.
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