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We were recently commissioned by  Magnetic Automation  to perform a crash simulation on one of their rising step barriers, using  Finite Element Analysis (FEA) . The rising step barrier is installed at site entry roads to prevent unauthorized vehicular access, and must be able to withstand the impact of a vehicle hitting the barrier at speed. Magnetic wanted to assess how their barrier design would perform to PAS68:2010, which is a standard test specification for impact testing of vehicle security barriers. In this case, the test involved a 7.5T truck hitting the barrier at 64km/h. FEA was chosen to assess the design due to the expense of a physical test, which would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform. We used a deformable model of a full truck assembly to give the most realistic results possible. To simply impact the barrier with a rigid mass would transfer too much energy into the structure, and would lead to an over engineered desi...

August 11, 2010 By  Marc. Caspe, Jun Ji, Lin Shen, and Qian Wang Abstract   Anti-terrorism physical barrier techniques and applications have become highly desired to protect critical facilities and human lives in recent years. Based on in-depth review and practices, the systemic criteria are proposed here for selection of security barriers specifically against terrorist attacks with truck-borne explosives.  Motivated from the survey and evaluation of typical perimeter security systems, a highly secured Surface Barrier and associated technologies developed recently are presented in details. In contrast to most conventional barriers with a fixed base, the proposed new Surface Barrier technology employs an innovative “calibrated” energy-dissipation concept to decelerate a crashing vehicle gradually instead of relying on rigid impact. The impact force transferred to the base is controlled to such a low level that deep or massive foundations are not needed...