Abstract
Road infrastructures constitute a typical example of outdoor installa-tions that are strongly exposed to atmospheric agents and potential impacts in-volving high quantities of energy. Consequently, investigations assessing the safety of road equipment, specifically road barriers, are of high importance. Road barriers in the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen are commonly made of Cor-Ten, a worldwide known weathering steel with a remarkable self-passivation property. The scope of this research is to develop a complete FEM model of Cor-Ten road barriers, type PAB H2 CE, widely adopted in the territory of South Tyrol. The aim of such model is the charachterization of the mechanical behavior of this type of road barriers, for the further creation of the related Digital Twin, in order to obtain a fully-furnished digital model of the specific typology of road barriers in exam and enabling a real-time monitoring with the subsequent instal-lation of sensors on existing road barriers. An open source code (Code_Aster) has been exploited to simulate the collision of a generic vehicle bumper and an existing road safety barrier made with Cor-Ten; the FEM simulation focused on deformations, acting forces, and absorbed energy. Results show that such typol-ogy of road barriers may be well able to absorb the energy involved in a typical road accident and that the developed FEM model can be integrated in the digital version of real-world road barriers, obtaining a Digital Twin that also describes the barrier mechanical behavior under accident conditions.