Numerical and Experimental Analyses of a Lighting Pole in Terms of Passive Safety of 100HE3 class

Nowadays trends related to the road safety make the lighting poles producers meet rigorous requirements that decrease the risk of death and injury of vehicle drivers in case of the impact. New requirements are in force from 1 January 2015, when Road and Bridge Research Institute informed that each pole liable to a direct vehicle impact has to meet Standard PN-EN 12767. The article presents the design of a novel, safe lighting pole. The novelty lies in the pole simplicity, which results in the manufacturing technology the cost of which is comparable to that of the conventional pole. Compared to the conventional poles of thickness 3 mm and greater, this one is made of thin-walled steel sheet of increased strength parameters and specially designed sleeve that is fixed to the base plate. The crash tests carried out on the track for the impact experiments proved that the requirements of the standards in the driver highest safety class and in the high vehicle kinetic energy absorption were satisfied both for the speed impact 35 km/h and 100 km/h. The numerical model for simulations of the vehicle behaviour during and after the impact was implemented in software Ansys LS-Dyna. The simplifications of some elements were of negligible influence on the analysed phenomena. The comparative parameters were ASI, THIV and exit velocity of the vehicle. The numerical results were close to the empirical ones, therefore they confirmed that finite element analysis can be successfully applied at the stage of elaborating of the initial concepts of the road lightning poles. It follows that the number of expensive crash tests can be reduced.