Roadway crash barriers are designed to improve road safety by preventing vehicles from leaving the roadway after impact.
Current road barriers have disadvantages—while they can prevent injury to nearby people and/or objects, they also can subject the occupants of the vehicles to abrupt deceleration levels high enough to cause injury or death.
NASA Johnson Space Center has developed a new deceleration-limiting roadway barrier that would provide three critical advantages over current technology by: 1) allowing sideway-impacting vehicles to continue sliding along a racetrack without catching them, 2) catching directly impacting vehicles to prevent them from injuring nearby persons and objects, and 3) absorbing kinetic energy in a more nearly optimum way to limit decelerations to levels that human occupants could survive.
The concept of the new technology includes a structure made in sections, with each section featuring a net (or mesh) "sandwiched" between thin, energy-absorbing panels.
The net is secured to anchors by energy-absorbing straps that deploy under a tension-causing load, which decelerates the moving vehicle.
These straps provide a controlled resistance to the tensional load over a predefined placement or stroke to bring the moving vehicle to a stop.
An additional feature of the technology includes the roadside surface of the panel being coated with Teflon® or another similar material, which would prevent sideway-impacting vehicles from breaking into the barrier.
At the ends of the wall segment, a thin, aluminum tube would hold the net and panels upright until a vehicle crashed into the wall. A pair of adjacent parallel walls would be erected with the joints between their segments staggered to ensure that a vehicle crashing at any position would be stopped by at least one of the walls.
This technology opportunity is part of the NASA Technology Transfer Program, the goal of which is to stimulate development of commercial applications of NASA-developed technology. NASA is seeking industrial partners to continue the testing effort and license the technology for commercialization.
For further information or commercial licensing information, contact the JSC Technology Transfer Office, jsc-techtran@mail.nasa.gov, or 281-483-3809.
