Heavy Vehicle Barrier Design with Structurally Independent Foundation

Abstract

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Bridge Design Manual (BDM) requires that bridge columns that are placed near a roadway to be designed or shielded for impact. Many of them were built years before the Bridge Design Manual reflected these guidelines, leaving shielding as the only effective solution. BDM demands the design of the barrier to be 54 inches tall to maintain the structurally independent foundation and to meet Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) Test Level 5 (TL-5) for any bridge pier within 10 feet of the roadway. A barrier design meeting these requirements is not currently available, neither a specific method to design such a barrier. Furthermore, TxDOT demands the design of a 36-inch tall structurally independent barrier to be placed as a continuation barrier from the bridge deck to the roadway and to meet MASH Test Level 4 requirements. The main objectives of this work are to (i) develop conceptual designs of structurally independent foundation with 54-inch tall single slope concrete barrier (SSCB) for MASH TL-5 and 36-inch tall SSCB for MASH TL-4, (ii) evaluate, develop and simulate full-scale finite element models (FEM) of the concepts, and (iii) select the most critical design for further evaluation.