Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference, 2000, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Paper

This work arrives at an overview of requirements necessary to provide survivable impacts between a range of motorcars and energy-absorbing poles stand-up poles. Poles that are expected to remain upstanding after a crash. The requirements are for the space, forces and the energies that have to be dealt with in the development of such poles. The methods used include a validated force-intrusion model derived from full scale tests and the finite element crash simulation package LS-DYNA. These were used to estimate the intrusion into cars and the crush into the pole necessary to limit the car’s accelerations. Solutions were sought that provide a maximum acceleration of 20g at the centre of mass of cars impacting onto poles from 60 km/h.