A Study on Highway Guardrail Improvement

The guardrails are used to protect the errant vehicles from roadside hazard. When
impacted, they prevent the vehicle from veering off the roadways into oncoming
traffic. Other than that, they also minimize the probability of severe injury. The
objective ofthis project is to modify the current highway guardrail design to make it
safer especially to the motorcyclist community. In addition, this study also wants to
reduce the 'cheese-cutter' effect and also increase the time of impact. Therefore,
when time of impact increase, the impact force will be lesser. To complete this
project, the author has chosen the flexible wire rope barrier to be the main focus in
this study. Then, she has come up with several alternative designs of the flexible wire
rope barrier to be compared with the current design. The current model and
alternative model performance will be compared based on experimental method.