STUDY ON OPTIMIZATION AND CONTROL PARAMETERS OF A CONCEPT MODEL OF HIGHWAY CRASH CUSHIONS

To design highway crash cushions efficiently, it is essential to understand the mechanical properties of the movement collision forms in the process of vehicle collision. A three degrees of freedom spring-mass model is used to optimize an existing conceptual model, and the explicit dynamics software LS-DYNA was used for the analysis. From the study, the important structural parameters are identified as the yield load, initial stiffness and crush distance, which can be used for any crash cushion system with design conditions of 1.3 t vehicle head-on impact with 60 km/h impact speeds.