Impact Barrier
Rigid barriers are commonly used as defence measures in hilly areas to contain falling boulders and landslide debris. A large-scale pendulum impact experiment was carried out in the Smart Structures Laboratory in Swinburne University of Technology to understand the behaviour of these barriers under high energy impact with and without a covering cushion layer.
A new displacement-based model in the form of a closed-form solution was used to estimate the performance of the wall under impact load and compared with the experimental results. Results showed that this new calculation method can be successfully used as new approach in design impact barriers.
More details: https://eng.unimelb.edu.au/ingenium/engineers-cushion-landslide-barriers-for-global-impact
A large-scale pendulum impact experiment was carried out in the Smart Structures Laboratory in Swinburne University of Technology. The experiment involved striking a 0.23 m thick, 1.5 m tall and 3.0 m long reinforced concrete wall by “torpedo” shaped impactor objects with mass ranging from 280 kg to 1020 kg. Over 60 pieces of instruments were employed to record important parameters such as the movement of the impactor objects and amount of strain experienced by the reinforcing bars.
Four months of planning phase preceding the actual event were required for the preparation of specimens and instrumentation. The first strike happened on the 25th of April 2018. The experiment was structured into four phases, with each phase focusing on different aspects of the target wall’s response behaviour, all of which are presented in the video.
All personnel involved including the lead research team are acknowledged in the video.