Optimization Design Of Highway Non-rigid Guardrail System Based On RBF-MQ Surrogate Model

With the rapid development of highway in our country, highway traffic accidents also submit the tendency that goes up year by year. In highway traffic accidents, near 1/3 is caused by vehicle impacting with guardrail. It has caused huge personal casualties and economic losses every year. Guardrail is the most main safety protection facilities in highway especially non-rigid guardrail. Which it main role is to absorb part of the crash energy to reduce the peak acceleration of the car and can force the car which is out of control going back to the normal traveling direction and avoiding the second collision occurs. Along with the vigorous development of the highway, the demand of guardrail will increase rapidly, therefore, installing the reasonable guardrail on highway has significant effects on preventing personal casualties.This paper begins with a brief summary of the status of research in guardrail at domestic and foreign in recent years. Then describes the basic theory about guardrail and the evaluation criteria of guardrail collision, especially analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of non-rigid guardrail. Next on the basis of domestic and foreign research methods commonly used in the guardrail, we propose a practical and convenient method to optimize the guardrail. Finally, from the occupant safety point of view, the thrie-beam guardrail and cable guardrail which are most widely used on the highway are optimized using radial basis function surrogate model.In the optimization process of the non-rigid guardrail, firstly has established the finite element model of automobile and the guardrail based on Hyperworks software, Consider the crash performance and occupant safety as the optimization problem. Then, the sampling points are selected using the design of experiment, and construct the radial basis function surrogate model of the objective functions. After that, genetic algorithm is used to obtain the optimization results, and making the comprehensive evaluation of optimal guardrails. Studies have shown that the optimized overall crashworthiness of guardrails have been greatly improved.In this paper, the method for optimization of non-rigid guardrail structure can applicable to any form of guardrail. This optimization approach not only enriches the computer simulation analysis, but also makes up the deficiencies of designing guardrail by relying on a large number of real vehicle collision experiments and design experience, and can effectively reduce the guardrail up front design cycle, it has a certain reference value.